HN 64 
.H27 
Copy 1 





March 1831. 






FOUNTAINGROVE LIBRARY. 




Vol. I. No. 1. 


SOCIAL SERIES. 


Issued Q«art«rlr. 


Entered at the Santa Rosa Post Office as second-class matter. 


HN 64 






.H27 






Copy 1 







THE 



NEW REPUBLIC 



'ROSPECTS, DANGERS, DUTIES AND SAFETIES 



OF THE TIMES. 



THOMAS LAKE HARRIS 



SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA 
T. L. Harris, Publisher. 




THE NEW REPUBLIC 



A DISCOURSE 

OF THE 

PROSPECTS, DANGERS, DUTIES AND SAFETIES 
OF THE TIMES. 



J 



J 



THOMAS LAKE HARRIS 




FOUNTAINGROVE PRESS 

SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA 



1891 

0"3 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891, by 

THOMAS LAKE HAKEIS, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 






To my Fellow Servants 

in Social Humanity 

i proffer 

in this Chalice of Sacrament 

the new wine 

of the Father's Kingdom, 



DISCOURSE 



" Suifer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: 
for of such is the kingdom of God." Luke xviii, 16. 



Through God, labor and solidarity ; through liberty, 
equality and fraternity ; the sons and daughters of the 
People, children of the Divine Parentage, enter into the 
sympathies of the Christ, and find the political, social, 
industrial kingdom of heaven. 

Were there five gentlemen in California, fully devoted to 
the cause of the Social People, and possessed of the brain, fi- 
nancial shrewdness, tact, concentrated purpose and reliance 
on each other, by which the magnates of the Central and 
Southern Pacific Systems conceived and carried out their 
enterprise, the State might be re-organised on Social-Nation- 
al lines at least by the close of the century. This result 
might be achieved with no more friction and far less of 
monetary expenditure than was required to span the conti- 
nent with the iron rail. The same result, in the opinion 
of social-political savants whose learning and experience 
command high respect, is attainable under similar condi- 
tions by the Republic, within a period that should not ex- 
ceed the life-time of a generation. 



X 



/ 



i 



I THE NEW HE PUBLIC. 

"History is Philosophy, teaching by example." The pet- 
ty shop of Huntington and Hopkins ; the combined capital 
of less than $50,000. has become what we see to-day. Two 
hundred and fifty millions of dollars of result arc said to be 
absorbed into the private wealth- of these five citizens, their 
heirs, attorneys and other trusted agents and beneficiaries. 
Governors, senators, congressmen, state legislators, judges 
of all courts to the highest, together with the vast retinue 
of subordinate state and federal officials, have been turned 
out from the shops of these master workmen with a rapidi- 
ty and ease comparable to the facility with which the tin- 
smith supplies the housewives with their kettles and pans. 

It is the ruler of the steering gear who turns and holds 
the ship to her course. It is the able and united minority 
that controls the movement and forms or transforms the 
environment of the Nation. 

An eminent Politician of New York, whose residence at the 
time was the most aristocratic mansion on fifth avenue — that 
too a fruit of his adroit practice of Democracy — remarked. " I 
went some years ago to Trenton for the fourth of July cele- 
bration. Invited to a seat in the barouche occupied by the 
dignitaries who held the place of honor in the procession, 

one of them smilingly said, on my entrance, 'Mr. , allow 

me to introduce ; you are now in the carriage with the 
Democratic Party of New Jersey.' " It is now a fact of his- 
tory that the trio thus named w r ere for years, before and 
after, the practical rulers of that Commonwealth ; the foun- 
tain of its law and the bestowers of its franchises and offices. 

Supreme tact, adequate jDolitical knowledge, the key of 
the position and absolute confidence in each other were all- 
sufficient to the end. Three citizens, Messrs. Weed, Seward 
and Greeley, after the same fashion somewhat modified, were 
the Whig Party in New York, till the copartnership was dis- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. O 

solved by the withdrawal of the junior partner. — It was an 
American enlargement and improvement of "Quirk, Gam- 
mon and Snap." 

A rising parson, whose name should not be mentioned, 
as long ago as the forties, once went for a long day's drive 
with one of the "insiders of the insiders ;" a member of the 
Democratic State Committee. In a confidential talk the 
young levite drew from the astute Achitophel the working 
method and tactics of the organization. These structures 
of Party and victories of spoil are no more a mystery or a 
difficulty to the initiated than is the use of the type-writer 
to one who has a knowledge of the keys. 

Government, if successful and durable, is from a small 
center to a great circumference. Adapt the centrality to 
the environment and the huge result follows as a matter of 
course. It was an axiom, of the Jesuits during the era of 
religious intolerance, that "if ever persecution failed to sup- 
press heresy, it was because Persecution did not persecute 
enough." If ever a Political Party fails, it is from the lack 
of persistent purpose, courage and unity in its nucleus ; 
combined with the inability to hold a grip on the wheel of 
environment and to direct its motion, so that it shall be 
impelled by the force of evolution, active through the needs 
of the masses and the spirit of the time. 

First of all must be, among the units of the nucleus, in- 
violable confidence in each other : firm trust, full honor. 
The vast Corporation that includes the Southern and Cen- 
tral Pacific Systems was invulnerable so long as its five 
originators all lived and maintained relations of personal 
and mutual fellowship and trust. Since then it is a great 
whale pursued by sword-fish : it flounders in a sea that be- 
gins to redden from its blood. 



4 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

The Power within evolution operates to the birth and 
dominance of events by a law which may be designated as 
"the law of fitnesses in association." An illustration of 
this may be drawn from that conclave at Sacramento. 
There was Stanford, genial, warm-hearted, winning and 
holding men by personal presence ; commanding confidence, 
constitutionally en rapport with the class from which are 
drawn judges, law-makers, rulers of the state ; a man with 
a rich blending of ideal and practical qualities ; with a vi- 
sion opening to possibilities of the anearing future ; with a 
faculty of inspiring respect for his conclusions, and with a 
sure method of organising successes for his processes. 
There was Hopkins ; calm, cold-blooded, persistent as a 
sleuth-hound on the hunt ; his greed omnivorous, but gov- 
erned and guided by a prudence, and structured in a cal- 
culation that was accurate as mathematics. There was 
Huntington ; an embryo great man of a narrow specialty ; 
with an instinctive grasp at large results ; without an atom 
of the ideal sense ; with a brain set in matter as an iron 
bar spiked in a granite wall ; but with a tenacity for hold- 
ing a scheme into its working plan and for enlarging on the 
plan, that made him a combination at once of engineer, 
engine, coal, fire and motive power. There was Crocker 
primus ; eminently a builder ; at once an organiser of con- 
struction and its thoroughly capable, prudent and indefat- 
igable executive. There was Crocker secundus; at once 
evangelically pious, eloquent, skilled in the law and hold- 
ing to gain with entire singleness of heart. Now the Force 
behind evolution knit these men together : it was an asso- 
ciation by fitnesses. 

" There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough hew them as we will." 



T ll E SfEW REPUBLIC. 5 

Stanford saw the gain and the glory ; his associates eyed 
the gain pure and simple. The Power in evolution behind 
the group beheld these men, if combined, as an organised 
form of service, fitted to prosecute one work in the chain 
of infinite processes. So the evolution fitted into them ; 
fought through them for the vast material wealth that is 
visible to-day. 

They were filled with confidence in the success of that 
work : hence they inspired confidence in the public, so far 
as to secure legislation in its favor with immense loans 
and subsidies. Comparatively insignificant separately, as 
private individuals ; the combination made one compact, 
gigantic Character. They built stronger, ampler and wiser 
than they foresaw or realised. The five pawns were con- 
solidated to fashion a master-piece upon the chess-board of 
Destiny. 

Such as this is the inner formation and history of all 
great works that have altered the aspect of the world and 
changed or re-organised the institutions that are the envi- 
ronments of the Peoples. This is the Lesson of the Hour, 
to be pondered over by the brainy and hearted men who 
are now being drawn by the sympathy of social humanity 
to a vital and intelligent interest in the National cause. 



The Press in large degree conceals it ; the Pulpit almost 
ignores it ; yet the People itself — minus the petty classes 
that subsist by the exploitage of the industries — is throbb- 
ing, panting, heaving under the consciousness of an infinite 
suppression; under thesense of vast inrpending calamity; yet 
in the strange quivering tingle of a vague but luminous and 
prophetic hope. The eagerness with which Mr. Bellamy's 
shrewdly phrased and skilfully adapted romance was seized 



6 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

upon ; the avidity with which men and women fed upon 
its luscious promise ; the flash of resultant Nationalism, 
leaping up all over the land from fifty thousand fire- 
sides, — this is but one and the most obvious of many con- 
current events, all of which go far to prove that Columbia 
herself, the myriad-bosomed, myriad-bearing Woman Peo- 
ple, is pregnant and heavy for a new and thrice auspicious 
birth of Time. 

But evolution has hitherto operated, since the era of re- 
corded human history, in a law of alternatives. Steam is 
generated in a boiler : the alternative is, — Shall the steam, 
rightly governed, be our servant, fulfilling its humane ser- 
vice ; or, shall it be our master, and rush to explosion with 
wreckage and death ? 

So again, as Mr. Bellamy has aptly said, "Now we are on 
the hinge of destiny." That the Competitive System, merg- 
ing into Capitalistic Combination, by its inherent law whirls 
rapidly on to the explosion of its forces, threatening in that 
explosion national chaos, industrial break and political anar- 
chy, every intelligent student is aware. It is not now "after 
me the delude." It is now "on me the deluge.'' We stand 
on the edge of the low, submerging shore ; Ave are confront- 
ed by the vast, towering, omnipotent, incoming water-wall. 

The wisdom of the disorganised masses, if it ever is a wis- 
dom, is a wisdom after the event. The good citizens of Paris 
were wise, after Danton, the very pillar of their safety and 
bulwark of their liberty, had been butchered on the guillo- 
tine ; but they were not wise before the event : they looked 
on, dazed and stivpified, with a dumb animal pity, and saw 
him led to death by a gang of scoundrels temporarily in lo- 
cal power : they did not lift a hand or make a murmur. 
In his fall Freedom for the time was baffled : the rising 
light was thrust back on the dial of the ages. 







THE NEW REPUBLIC. / 

Now Social Nationalism is to the United States all 
and more than was embodied in Danton and the Dan- 
tonists for the French nation. The Movement exists already 
in avast diffused atmosphere of public sentiment, passionate 
hope, deathless divine longing ; pulsing, firing, vibrating in 
and through the People's common breast. 

Social Nationalism, as a vital and diffusive ether of asso- 
ciation and environment enveloping and quickening the 
many, waits thus in them to become organised, concreted, 
institutional association and environment. In the advanc- 
ed and energetic few it has passed on to the more organic 
and active stage : not alone do they feel the flow and vibrate 
to the passion of the sentiment : they, to a considerable ex- 
tent, comprehend it in the logic of pure reason, by the 
principle of its growth and by the form and law of its 
intelligence. 

If therefore Social Nationalism — which is, so far as it has 
grown, the saving power in our evolution — is to become 
embodied and established for the next stage as the Organ- 
isation of Public Safety, the small minority of fully deter- 
mined, balanced, practical, socially educated men and women, 
who know the ground and realise the situation, must follow 
the impulse of the law of the association of fitnesses and 
draw together. They who are wise before the event must 
conform by action to the logical demands of the time. 

But it is not yet clear day : these are the spectral moments 
that precede the dawn. At best we are but partially awak- 
ened out of the long slumber and death-dream, in which 
the torpid mankind holds its atomised, incoherent and ego- 
istic individualism. It is hard to resist the siren voices 
that call for a little more folding of the hands in sleep. 
Yet even now the golden moments, the brief moments that 
remain for the Organisation of Safety, are slipping past, 



8 T II E N E W R E P UBLIC. 

never to return. 

The transition-births of Publie Freedom in the past have 
been effected by so far as the Hour brought forth the men. 
The Hour '76 found Jefferson, Adams, Franklin. The Hour 
'93 found Danton, Fabre D'Eglantine, Carnot. The Hour 
'45 found Garrison, Parker, Phillips. The Hour '61 found 
Lincoln, Sumner, Stanton. — AVhere shall '91 find her sages 
of the council, her orators of field and platform, her expo- 
nents of the press, her organisers of finance, her volunteers 
of the forlorn hope ? 

The coming Event, — the transition from egoised indivi- 
dualism to humanised collectivity, — is more than evolutions 
of the past, because it involves in its body and fulfils in its 
expansion the divine result whereto all steps and stages of 
the previous march of Man have led. This hope and pro- 
mise of the Supreme Benificence can only be received, 
incorporated and made fulfilment by so much as men, 
who love it, who know it, who trust in it, shall devote their 
full being to its demands This and nothing less will call 
forth that fire of courage and breadth and prudence of wis- 
dom, and vigor of persistence and heartiness of association 
and mutuality of confidence, that shall lead Evolution by 
Living Force to be embodied in their structures, and to 
make their movement irresistible. 

Such men, such women, must and will be found, adequate 
to the emergencies and fitting into the necessities of the 
time. From the five to the fifty, the five hundred, the five 
thousand, the Hour that is upon us summons the children 
and servants of her Destiny. She attracts to their nucleating 
form the vital cell-germs of the Deathless Social People 
that shall be. — " Ca Ira" : God is with us and within us! 



THE NEW TIE PUB LIC. 9 

II. 

Thus far the problem of Social-National niicleation has 
been considered from one factor of its equation : this by it- 
self is not truth in full circle, though it may indicate its he- 
misphere. Another law in evolution is that of association 
by fitnesses of sociality. It is upon this that we must rely 
for the structure of the heroic nuclei, that are to serve for 
the birth of the Peoples to a truly socialised humanity. 

The Socialisation of the People is the work of Titans, and 
they must rise from the breadth and firmness of the com- 
mon soil: men matriculated in the university of Labor ; men 
in whom the Nation stands organised for constitution. A 
gigantic work, the effort of supreme evolution, it calls for 
gigantic men. 

Now it is asserted that "Collectivism will destroy indi- 
viduality and result in a generation of common-place imbe- 
cilities." So the spread of the bulb may be said to destroy 
the bulb ; but the bulb that disappears in the growth pro- 
cess is not destroyed ; it is diffused to a new birth in the 
breathing, leafy stalk and its crown of constellated flowers. 
So the raw, primitive nature-wealth of the egoised indivi- 
dual, as he becomes non-egoised, lives to its last value in 
the humanised enlargement of the abundant social man. 

The massive man — egoised individualist — always by his 
growth becomes the anarch, the devourer, the destroyer: 
the more of him the worse for mankind. He is the spread- 
ing tree, whose roots suck up and absorb the fertilities of 
the area measured by its shadow. It is the prospective 
glory of Collectivity that it will put an end to the generations 
of the anakim. 

Man is only in his real manhood as he is socialised 
through all his powers : the more of him the more of hu- 



10 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

mane worthfulness in his fellow men : his being becomes 
the household work-room of organising Deity. 

But evolution through the social passion and its life of 
humane service, transmutes the individuality from nature- 
hood into humanhood. It transfigures the private self from 
the low, base, serpentine thing, crawling on its belly and 
feeding upon dust, to the majestic creature of God; its 
attitude upright ; its radiation beauty ; its movement har- 
mony ; its aspect benignant, intelligent, divine. The mis- 
sion of Collectivity is "not to destroy but to fulfil." 



The strong men of the world, who effect immense results 
by means of the associative law, combine upon the princi- 
ple of a mutual service in the common egoism. "There is 
honor," of its base sort, " among thieves." This is the asso- 
ciation of wolves, who hunt in packs because singly they are 
unable to overcome their larger prey. This is the association 
of pirates, who choose their officers, select their crew and are 
amenable to a common discipline, because on this depends 
the triumph of the black flag and the capture of the peace- 
ful merchantman : this is the association of the trusts and 
syndicates. Individual greed, in men of strong organism 
and trained intelligence, evolves to associative form and 
force by the fitnesses of concurrent rapacities. 

We see this law and form of association exemplified in 
such organisations as the old Tammany Ring, of which 
Win. H. Tweed was the pivotal and master spirit. Genet 

the courtly gentleman ; H the brilliant and versatile man 

of letters ; Conolly the genial, hearty Irish romah catholic 
squire ; Barnard, with the judicial cunning and rapacity of 
Jeffries; Watson, with the affable, prudent air and man- 
ner of New England ; Tweed the arch-boss, coarse, vulgar, 



THE NEW REPUBLIC, 11 

insolent, brazen-faced, with the bull-dog's conscience and 
tenacity of grip ; a mass of concreted acuteness of fraud 
embodied in a corporeity of vulgar ostentation ; — these 
serve as indices of the average. But, wound into the cen- 
tral nucleus of never more than ten or a dozen, was a group 
of a hundred, enlarging to hundreds in its circumference; 
the master-adepts of a bad school ; inheriting traditions 
from the lips of its founder, Aaron Burr, and grown to 
consummate skill in the arts of abstraction, division, con- 
cealment and silence. 

All were antagonised by mutual disgusts, and yet all 
united by that fearful law, of fellowship by fitnesses of rapa- 
cities. They loathed each other ; they despised each other ; 
they feared each other. Each knew every one of his asso- 
ciates to be a villain ; but they eulogised each other ; they 
stood by each other through thick and thin ; they maintain- 
ed in their intercourse the fiction of a jovial good fellowship ; 
they confided mutually in the secrets of vast schemes of 
public plunder ; they shared the booty fairly according to 
the sense of corporate honesty that obtains among cut- 
purses. For the time they were borne triumphantly on 
the swelling bosom of the Democracy of the State. 

This is but the meagre outline of ten thousand other 
nuclei, large and small, political, financial; — Oil rings, 
Sugar rings, Lumber rings, Railroad and TelOgraph rings, 
"their name is Legion, for they are many," — that have 
grown up since and that flourish now. 

It is not to be supposed that the Cleveland or Hill nuclei 
in the Democratic, or the Blaine or Allison nuclei in the 
Republican party, or even the great nodules of trusts and 
syndicates, represented by men of the high standing of the 
Lorillards, the Pullmans, the Vanderbilts etc, are implicat- 
ed in technical or legal felonies. Gentlemen of irreproach- 



12 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

able private morals occupy places of eminence in many, if 
not in all. None are implicated in the criticism, excepting 
thus far, that these are associations founded and formulated 
in the same law ; men drawn together by the attraction of 
passionate pursuits, which are not for the divine well-being 
and humane association of the People ; which are not in 
any sense in, of or for the People ; which are in the most vital 
sense hostile to the objects for which the People exists ; — -in 
fine, working toward the subversion and destruction of the 
system of equal laws and equal rights to all, which was the 
object sought in the constitution of the Republic. . 

It is easy for egoised men of a congenial fitness, and pur- 
pose to associate thus, because there is no divinity in the 
association ; because each finds in it a pedestal for the ele- 
vation of his individual self-interest ; because that private 
self-interest and instinct of self-preservation and self-ad- 
vancement forces it upon them. 

Nowthe difficulties in the way of centric and concentric nu- 
cleation among Social Nationalists are found just here. This 
movement being in the line of the direct divine tendency, it 
would therefore attract men to nucleate,— not by the binding 
of self-love to self-love in the compulsions of a mutual self- 
greed and self-interest ; but just oppositely, by the attractions 
of the divine social passions in each, flowing into each other 
and making, so to say, a marriage of mutual and reciprocative 
qualities. What said the Arch-Socialist of Nazareth, speak- 
ing as the organ of the Living Power in evolution ? " Where 
two or three are gathered together in my name I am with 
them : abide in me and I in you, so shall ye bring forth fruit." 

Social Nationalism, as the divine opening in man for the 
evolution of the Creative end, a divinely socialised humanity, 
must absolutely attract to nucleation, not by the natural 
law of the fitnesses of rapacities, but by its own law of the 



THE XEW REPUBLIC. 13 

attraction of un-rapacities, of anti-rapacities ; by the fire and 
urgency of the social passion, as opposed to the heat and 
insistence of the unsocial, of the anti-social. 

It would draw men toward the centre of the movement 
by the attraction and gravitation of their liberated and 
energetic social worths ; draw them to the brain of the move- 
ment, because they are in the brain of its divine thought ; to 
the heart of the movement, because they are filled and fired 
with the loverly passion of its service ; to the mailed right 
arm and decisive hand of the movement, because their ener- 
gies are becoming executive and forcible for its lead and sway . 

It would draw men, in fine, because they have died out 
of the range of the private motive passions, which energise 
for personal dominion and aggrandisement, and are being 
born again into the range of the public and social passions, 
which lead them, for Humanity's sake, into a self-effacement ; 
a yielding up of the individual aim and end into the aim 
and end of the evolution which seeks to lead to birth an 
organic Social People. 

Now here is no place for half-way men, those of divided 
interests, of opposing motives, of contending or halting pur- 
poses ; no room for waywardness, for doubt or lingerings 
or trepidations, "No man can serve two masters : " no two 
or more men can nucleate in the law of a divine social nu- 
cleation, excepting in so far as each is to a degree self-effaced 
and so born again from self-service into the service of the 
evolutionary organic social Man. 

The workers have to find each other on this principle, 
.and to recognise each other, so to say, "by the Master's 
word, spoken foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, 
hand to grip and mouth to ear." In fine, they must meet, 
touch and recognise each other on that higher ground of 
self-effacing, socialising personality and experience, which 



14 tin-; new retuIilic . 

i s analogous, on a different plane, to the mutual interflow 
and thrill by which kindred spirits of opposite sexes recog- 
nise their mutual fitness, relationship and interdependence. 

Old secret, known to Hebrew bards and prophets ; to 
seers, saints and sages of India and Greece ; imparted by 
the Nazarene Master to the beloved with whom he clasp- 
ed hands and broke bread ; known to Christian apostles 
and martyrs ; known to the heroic souls who fed with their 
lives the failing oil in the lamp of humanity during the 
cold, dark middle ages ; known since ; known now, if sought 
for in the utter devotion and consecration of the life ; — this 
must be found, this must be realised ; else the incipient Na- 
tionalism of to-day, however brilliant may be its tempo- 
rary leafage and flowerage, will rot down, fruitless. 

Such failure of result is not inevitable. The sore expe- 
riences of the past year have possibly taught the warm- 
hearted and earnest men and women who constitute the 
vital and effective body of Social Workers on the Pacific 
coast, that Social Nationalisation cannot prosper as a move- 
ment of superficiality. It begins to be seen, that it takes 
hold of the root principles in our real human nature ; that 
it is a divine growth ascending in and germinating through 
human nature, and that from these most vital principles it 
must ripen to fruitage, if it is to bear fruit at all. 

It is not going to advance as a fourth of July procession. 
It is not going to be consolidated after the method or in the 
law of the extant Political Parties . It is not going to 
achieve the ends of a mere vast Benefit Club. Bread and the 
circus for everybody was what the Csesars ensured to the 
populace of Rome. 

It is going to arise in the dignity, honor and self-sacrifice 
of socialised, of divinised human nature. It is going in the 
lines of its advance to carry people out of their dead, stu- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 15 

pined immersion and burial in private self and its belligerent 
interests, and to bear them on the bosom of its generous 
wave into the warm passions, the heroic aspirations, the 
courages and virtues of a true and real humanity. 

Its interests are not to be trifled with, nor its honors 
smirched, nor its confidences abused, nor its triumph post- 
poned or bartered, by local cliques or subtle demagogues. 
It will never be shaped into salons de luxe for the coteries of 
Mrs. Grundy to entertain their scandal parties. It is going to 
incorporate the elite of manhood, the divine flowerage of 
womanhood ; to awaken them to a sense of the divinities 
that thrill within them ; to evolve the repressed nobilities 
and lovelinesses that strive in their latent potence of hu- 
manhood, and to lead them forth, full armed, full illumined, 
into beatific and energised association. 

Neither is it to be aristocratic, in any sense by which that 
term is used in the parlance of the time. It is to fuse its 
might and worthiness into the Common People ; leading them 
into a common faith, a common hope, a common energy, 
for the common uprise. It will be only accessible — by the 
inexorable law of divinity in fitnesses — to those who are in 
heartful sympathy and alliance with its central principle of 
Common Good. Its hand must lift every man above his ac- 
cidents and its bosom upbear every woman from her 
misfortunes. 

Never yet, since the birth of History, has there ever been 
on Earth a genuinely human public opinion. On the other 
hand, public opinion as the times have known it, has been 
dominated by the inhuman pharisaic sentiment, clad with 
hypocrisies ; fed to felonies ; armed and exercised in mur- 
ders and generated in odious and self-exalted lusts. 

There is to be — it is rising now — a public opinion, born 
out of the generous-hearted considerateness of our common 



16 



THE NEW REPUBLIC 



and infinite humanhood. We are to rely on this, infilled 
and organised in the divineness and potence of the social 
passion, as the motive power, as the vast, revolving, irresist- 
ible wheel, that shall effect the revolution, the evolution, 
the re-creation of laws, customs and institutions. 




It is but childish folly to under-estimate the holding-and 
aggressive power of Capitalised Egoism. No rich man of' 
the type is ever satisfied, whatever may be the bulk of his 
possessions ; for the egoistic passion in its very essence is 
insatiable : it shapes in the man who is ruled by it an open 
grave, yawning ever for its spoil. Mr. John A. Rockafeller, 
when thirty years ago he enjoyed the salary of a poor clerk, 
probably looked up to $100,000. as a vast sum, which to pos- 
sess would fill the measure of his content. Well, he gain- 
ed — pious communicant as he was — the $100,000. He has 
since urged on the warfare of Standard Oil till the $100,000. 
has passed the $100,000,000. and is swiftly climbing to the 
$200^000,000. And is he satisfied ? To-day, with one hand, 
he clutches the Senate of the United States, and with the 
other he reaches out to the control of the entire system of 
public traffic and inter-communication from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific. 

200,000 men now are the legal owners of more than half 
of all the properties and resources of this nation of more 
than 60,000,000. Are they satisfied? Never was their grasp, 
their greed, their eager and remorseless pursuit of every 
remaining franchise and freedom of the People, as it is at 
this hour. Capitalised Egoism, by the law and spirit of 
its nature, can never stop in its inroad whilst any value re- 
mains to be possessed that it has not already appropriated, 
unless meanwhile it is mastered and abolished. Yet this is 



THE XE W B E P U B L I C ■. 17 

the Power which Social Nationalism has to meet. 

If the cumulative force of Capitalised Egoism extended 
thus far and no farther, it might possibly be encountered 
and overborne bv its natural enemies. But the Foe does 
not live solely in its shielded and solitary magnificence. 
It sits down by all but a small minority of hearths; it pro- 
mulgates its treasons against mankind from nearly every 
fire side. 

How is this? Simply because the average of the People, 
man and woman, young and old, are born and nurtured in- 
to the practical creed of the 19th Century. That creed is 
this : that men are individual, isolated monads, and that 
their first and last duty, pursuit and interest in life is, with 
whatever power they possess and facility they enjoy, to 
acquire and maintain private material possessions ; in com- 
petition with the neighbor ; irrespective of any misfortune 
or ruin that may occur to the neighbor, or to the general 
well-being, as the result of their successes in the competi- 
tive strife. The prayer of the self-seekers, young and old is, 
"0 that I might be rich, even as this Rockafeller !" 

Now, till the unhuman appetite for private egoistic wealth 
is swallowed up and abolished in the passion for the public 
wealth, the public welfare, this massed Plutocratic Egoism 
has its moral ally, its mental attorney, its vital support, its 
religious countenance, everywhere throughout this vast na- 
tional area of middle-class struggle and proletary anguish 
and destitution. 

We have to contend, as Social Nationalists, not only with 
a plutocratic opinion and sentiment, but also with a pluto- 
cratic passion that diffuses its virus through the flesh and 
blood of the People ; that feeds and strengthens in their 
food, that rests and re-energises in their repose, that whirls 
their thought from the logic of its reason to the notions of 
3 



1 8 T II E X E W 1 1 E PUliL I C . 

the unreason ; that organises feeling, desire, motive, effort, 
life itself, in the cruel and constrictive lines of bitter and 
relentless neighborhood war. The great body of the Public 
si augers mentally and morally; dazed, hypnotised, intoxi- 
cated, deluded, under the operation of this deadly spell. 

So the Nation maunders on ; sick in its religion ; impo- 
tent and improvident in its philanthropies ; lost to the 
consciousness of its own vital and inseparable humanhood, 
and of its most urgent and extreme necessities ; feeding the 
flower of its youth, exploiting the ripe worth of its man- 
hood, to the service of a foreign and malign oppression. 
It is not only that the People is defrauded of its bread ; it 
is poisoned almost to its core. Only the sweetest and most 
humanely heroic constitutions are enabled to hold a remains 
of the social will and consciousness ; overswept as they are, 
deluged as they are continually, by the floods of malignant 
and profane delusions. 

It is true that the Competitive System is inherently mor- 
tal ; by its own inexorable law the hour of supreme triumph 
must^also be the hour of ruin. It is true also that this ruin 
— unless a System of Public Safety is found ready for its 
place — will be fulfilled in the crash and explosion of all civ- 
il institutions. But it is also true that such wreckage and 
obliteration of moral and material results would still leave 
the Plutocratic Passion itself intact; organised in the pri- 
vate self of the multitude; entrenched there; defiant there 
as the master force and ruling instinct of the land. If there 
istobeno Socialist People evolving to dominion through 
the visible disaster, Civilisation must pass into a death-agon}', 
and must rise again — if it ever shall rise — through inco- 
herent, warlike barbarisms; the woes and inhumanities of 
unknown ages. 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 19 

[II. 

Evolution advances to its end by a process of ideas. This 
process leads on by two parallel and inter-related streams, 
each holding and operating by its own quality to its own 
differentiated specialty ; passions wed to thoughts and gene- 
rating forces. Each may be said to have innumerable eyes 
and arms ; methods, systems, manifold and comprehensive. 
Now these two currents of evolution have been growing up 
to their present special prominence from a period dating 
back to the last quarter of the preceding century. The 
first stream may be phrased as the inventive, the scien- 
tific, the mechanical-material. It leads by results to the 
dominion of man in the productive energies of Nature. It 
organises steam, it makes a workman of the lightning ; it 
harnesses the solar forces to planetary service. Last and 
most significant, it lays hand upon the secrets whereby the 
etheric forces that entwine in gravitation can be diseiit win- 
ed and led by rhythmical motion to evolve for human service 
the power of the powers. 

Man, who was heretofore the servant of these natural lares 
and genii, has at least begun to command the spells by 
which the genii shall be his subjects and fellow-workmen. 
Hence the labor-saving inventions, which, organised in 
their mechanical structures, are now equivalent to the dai- 
ly manual labor of millions of men in the United States 
alone, and which are capable of being increased easily to 
hundreds of millions : there being no limit but the necessi- 
ties of mankind. 

Now, more than a thousand years ago Evolution, urging 
toward result, found a pacific, frugal, industrious and intel- 
ligent pupil in the receptive reason of the Chinese nation. 
The tree of industrial invention rose to leaf, blossom and 



20 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

fruitage there. All of the sciences, all of the inventions fol- 
low in a law of series, of sequences. Chemistry was grasped 
as to the initiative ; printing was discovered ; gunpowder ; 
the ship-building art led up to the construction of ocean 
fleets. 

Then came the apprehension of the fact, that labor-saving 
inventions, largely substituting machine labor for toil of 
hand, would result in the withdrawal of employment from 
the masses, dependent on the sale of their lives in manual ser- 
vice for subsistence; with consequent want; the creation of 
pauperised hordes; the dissolution and ruin of families; the 
threatened disturbance of the equilibrium on which de- 
pends the institutions of public order. 

The government of China, with a firm hand and with 
no paltering or delay, encountered the apprehended danger. 
It put an entire stop to the progress of invention ; it arrest- 
ed the evolution. This benevolent Oriental Herod slew 
the young child in its cradle. Nevertheless, though the 
national form and system of China survived, the genius of 
its gift was excluded; the virility of its intellect was emas- 
culated; the promise of its social humanity was abolished. 
Its history from that time became stagnation. 

We are now confronted in America, with the recurrence 
of the cycle of evolution in science and scientific invention, 
by the consequences that daunted the governmental autho- 
rities of the Chinese People. 

There is a second current in the stream of evolution, 
which, were it to find free and abundant course, would ulti- 
mate to results in mankind, correspondential to the trium- 
phant conquests over Nature that ensue in the movement 
of its kindred flow. China did not win or grasp to the 
key-note of this dynamic current. It was bound in the 
superstition of the non-progressive, as applicable to human 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 21 

life. Its new youth was buried in the womb of a dead 
and sealed Antiquity. Its eyes were held to the pole of the 
frozen Past : they were not attracted to the fertile bosom 
and zone of the tropic Future. 

With us it is different : the light by which the sage 
Franklin saw to flash lightning from the clouds for the 
scientific evolution of electricity ; that light, transmuted to 
fiery human heat, generated in twain-bosomed America and 
France the surer flame that was the illumination of Liberty. 
The divine potence was enfranchised in the soul and flesh 
of man. Liberty generated for pregnant end fateful hours 
to a human atmosphere : men breathed it ; they breathed 
in it. 

Always before a revolution men feel its presence in the 
air : always before the vast uprising of a people, it so pal- 
pitates about them that the common bosom rises to the 
rhythms of its atmosphere. The fact is indisputable, what- 
ever may be the scientific or moral interpretation. And the 
form in which the Liberty of evolution clothes and displays 
its spirit is inevitably Law. Where Anarchy is welcomed 
Liberty recedes : where Anarchy thrives Liberty perishes. 

And Liberty means this : first of all, the awakening and 
disenthralment of those divine attributes ingenerated in 
man, which constitute the divinity of his manhood, from 
their bondage of repression. It does not mean the degrada- 
tion of man to the licence of his low-born animal origin : 
it means the uprise of the man, through round after round 
of wise and virtuous social service, till he breasts full to 
Deity, and finds home again within the precincts and pavil- 
ions of the God. 

Liberty means the effacement of the barriers that inter- 
pose between the common man and the achievement of the 
common destiny. There is no possibility for the achieve- 



4 



•J 2 T II E X E w k E P u b Lid. 

ment of the liberty of the individual, excepting as it is 
found in the pursuance of the service of the law that ensures 
the common freedom and well-being of the all. 

Leo XIII is bondsman under his papacy : Jay Gould is 
a serf under his plutocracy : Alexander III is a slave under 
his imperially. Each is in licence, but neither is in liberty, 
and neither can be in liberty till his licence perishes. No 
Opp.ressor is in liberty : all are in licence, and by so much 
as that licence empowers and authorises them to abridge 
and repress that liberty of others which exists only in the 
common right, they are themselves repressed from their 
own humanity. They drain the better blood from their 
own veins, when they make their hearts the goblets from 
which they quaff the life-flow of their fellowmen. 

Licence to make war upon the rights of others, upon the 
common rights of all, is but the licence to beget Crime and 
dandle Anarchy upon the knees. Who then are the Anar- 
chists by pre-eminence ? those w ho uprear their dominance 
in the suppression and exploitage of man, and hence in the 
anarchy of human powers. They may not apply the spark 
to the mine that threatens to explode Society ; but they 
generate a fluid of vital dynamite that is diffused, that 
flows in currents throughout the bodily form and corporate 
atmosphere of Society ; a fluid that is inherently explosive 
and that explodes in universal conflagration when full and 
ripe. 

The American Revolution was an evolution of Liberty : 
but the Mother Goddess, like the awful Isis, was vailed 
from even the most sage and devoted of her worshipers. 
None of them — notwithstanding the clause incorporated 
by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence — seem 
practically to have conceived that the recognition of the 
inherent right of man to liberty involved, by logical inipli- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 23 

cation, the doctrine of the common equality as well. 

Indeed, on mere natural grounds, the ground of finites, 
nothing can be more obvious than the fact, that men front 
to each other by universal inequalities. The Dantonists of 
France grasped at the concept of human equality, not so 
much by a process of conscious reasoning as by a logic of 
divination. If the Infinite Divine Humanity inhabits and is 
energetic in man, then it follows that, by this immanence 
of the Infinite, all are equally grouped, co-ordinated in the 
laws of that Infinitude, for the evolution through the each 
to the all and through the all to the each, of the divine so- 
cial corporeal humanity, which shall bear witness to the en- 
thronement and beatification of the Supreme Excellence 
in the social righteousness and holiness of the incorporate 
manhood and womanhood of the globe. 

Men can only associate and intermingle fully and freely 
with each other, as they are able to recognise the absolute 
sense in which they stand by one interdependent life, for 
one comprehensive function of life, upon one common 
ground of equality, in God and before God. It was worth 
all the agonies of the French Revolution, if it shall have 
brought Equality to its regal prominence and set it forth 
as a fact to be incorporated in the thought and action of 
mankind. 

All men free and equal by reason of the Divine imma- 
nence within them ! Add to this, all men. fraternal by virtue 
of the Divine Father-Motherhood, educing the divine- 
human sonship and daughterhood throughout the free, co- 
equal, interdependent all; — then we have the logical trinity 
of the divine factors in evolution ; the creed of the Social 
Christ ; the ethic of the new and social creation. 

For man, if he came forth from God, holds to his human- 
ity solely as he abides in God ; racial unity thus exists ; social 



24 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

unity becomes his destiny. Hence it is that the working 
masses, the only body that as such is in sympathy with the 
logic of humane causes and events, tends by the gravita- 
tion of qualities, the attraction of the passions, to the idea || 
of social, national and international incorporation and its f 
fruitions. 

Thus the secret of the world is found ; the problems of 
human life and destiny are solved; the eras of agony, of 
dissention and disunion terminate : for strife, concord! for 
disease, health! for disaster, security! for poverties, riches! 
for the blank misery and destitution of the creature, the 
Social People, wise, benignant, exalted; spontaneously 
fulfilling the common round of joyous activities in the com- 
mon consciousness and sentience of God ! 

The Social Christ, embodied and active in the latent 
passion and force, the potency and promise of the Working 
Man, stands now bound and in captivity before the tribunal 
of Pilate, represented in organised Plutocracy. The suc- 
cesses of evolution, on the lines of mechanical invention, 
have^armed and empowered that Plutocracy, by means of 
its absorption of the unearned increment, which represents 
the increase of wealth upon the planet by the toil of its 
myriads of productive laborers, ever since the century of 
inventions began. 

The appropriation of the unearned increment has armed 
Plutocracy as well with the power of that riches ; so invest- 
ed in the public, interest bearing securities of the civilised 
nations that the ruling dynasties are bound in its fortunes, 
pledged to its decisions and committed to its fate. 

Plutocracy also is armed, fortressed and massed, by means 
of such modicum of the unearned increment as is held as 
an investment in the mechanism of production and transit ; 
— a force equivalent at least to ten times the daily work- 



T H E X E W REP L" B L J C . 20 

ing power of the entire proletariat. 

Christ before Pilate! — yet Pilate trembles; for, though 
conscience may be extinct within him, there is a secret 
sense of insecurity; an awful foreboding of the judgment 
to come, when the Pilate of the age shall stand arraigned 
before the Industrial Christ of nations, helpless to escape 
from the decisions of the supreme tribunal. 

Tzars of the thrones, Plutotzars of the marts and ex- 
changes, — whatever there is upon the planet of extreme 
greed ; plus extreme wealth ; plus extreme sagacity and 
adroitness ; plus extreme force of the sanhedrim, the press, 
the bench and bar, the army and police ; plus the vast body 
of the parasitical classes that are fed from the offals of the 
tables of luxury, and that minister to its vast magnificence 
and voluptuousness, — all of these, by one consolidated 
power of antichrist, declare that the Christ of Labor shall 
die the death. — "Crucify him, crucify him!'' 

Labor has always been stripped, always scourged, always 
mocked, always brow-beaten ; always driven as a criminal 
on the via dolorosa, the bleeding pathway to the hill of 
agony. But Labor never, till as now, has made it evident 
by clear light, that the immanent God. abode within its 
form, was out-breathing through its social passion, enuncia- 
ting the truth of universal order through its quickening 
intelligence and knitting its members together into one 
compact' corporeal structure; a solidarity of social life. 

Thus it is seen, that Plutocracy has built up to this 
enormous power of dominion by means of its control of 
the productive machinery and political organisations of 
the world. It has grasped the resultant force that is the 
outgrowth of the evolution on its material plane.- — It is con- 
fronted, on the part of the People, by the luminous ideas 
that have been generated in the public mind by the evolu- 
4. 



2(3 T H E N J<: W R E PUBLIC. 

tion, advancing on the lines of its human and humanising 
plane. 

It is a realisation of that sublime prophetic vision of the 
Apocalypse. The Woman clothed with the sun is bringing 
forth the Man-Child, born to the rule of nations. The dra- 
gon, coiled, intent, is waiting to devour the infant in the 
hour of its birth. — We are drawing toward the supreme cri- 
sis in the history of the globe. 

IV. 

The horror and heart-break of the present miserable situa- 
tion is, that it is a war of members in the one inseparable body 
of mankind. Plutocracy and Proletariat, the parasite and 
the producer, are essentially one heart, one life, one flesh. 
There is but one interest that is vital and real, and this 
interest human and common to all. 

The one question, underlying, inherent to and pervading 
all issues that are raised or that can be raised is this : shall 
Mankind struggle and wrangle on, involved in the univer- 
sal warfare and murder of its private selfism, the squalor 
and contemptibility of its base naturehood ; or, shall it trans- 
form that naturehood, enlarging through it into the social 
passion, the social institutions, the sweetness, culture and 
opulence of its divine-natural humanity? 

It may be possible to conceive of new. environments, 
brought about by compromises and mutual concessions of 
the private self, that shall ensue in a partial restoration of 
the equilibrium of riches. Yet such arrangements in the 
nature of things can be but tentative and temporary. They 
can only be brought about, moreover, through bitter con- 
troversies, heart-burnings, lacerations of the Body Sensitive 
and strain and peril of the Body Politic. 



T 1 1 E X E W R E P tf S Li C . 2? 

The Avar of strikes and boycotts threatens always to become 
a war of public insurrection. Pinkerton's police, State Mili- 
tia, the Sheriff's posse are powerful ; but so are the massed 
Toilers ; their roused and maddened wifehood and mother- 
hood : so is dynamite. 

A mortgaged agricultural State, ruined by failing crops, 
ten per cent interest, onerous rates of railway transportation, 
tariff-taxes, prices of farm products reduced below the cost 
of production by the system of cornerage, — what is it but a 
State on the edge of revolution or secession ? 

It is easy to conceive of a possible situation, in which the 
Farming States, as Independent Sovereignties in the Union, 
may array their governing authorities, legislature, courts, 
citizen soldiery, against the Federal powers. It is easy to 
look on to the birth of a new Confederacy : our Union is not 
a band of invulnerable steel ; it is a glass globe : we feel 
already the jar of the concussions : its atoms may fly apart ; 
it may shiver into fragments. 

The Yeomanry of the Nation is plodding, patient, conser- 
vative, non-aggressive ; the last of the land to be aroused to 
social-political innovation. Yet its fire when aroused is not 
the flame of the stubble : it is the fierce heat of enduring- 
anthracite. 

The Bucolic Issachar may be "an ass bowing between two 
burdens," and Plutocracy may be a "lion of Judah, ravening 
for the prey." But rouse Issachar too far, urge him till he 
meets the opportune, and the dumb creature trumpets in 
tones as authoritative as when the ass spoke to Balaam : — nay, 
"he is transformed ; he is ass no more ; his aspect is that of the 
war-angel with sword of flame. How was it at Lexington, 
when the Yeomanry of Massachusetts Bay rose from their 
invaded homes on Lord Percy's red coats ? How was it 
when they made of their breasts a shield and rampart for 



28 THE XE W K E PUBLI C . 

Liberty on Bunker Hill ? 

It was the torpor of the Yeomanry of France that led to the 
failure of the Commune in '71. It was the wakening and 
arming of the Yeomanry of England that overthrew the 
monarchy and resulted in the temporary establishment of 
the Commonwealth : they were the Ironsides. 

The Yeomanry of the United States is stirring and moving 
now. Its methods may for the time be incoherent and re- 
sult in failures : its present leaders may prove inefficient, as 
not being possessed of the genius of the occasion. But let 
the occasion last, let it ripen, and the fated leaders are sure 
to arrive. So Cromwell was found for Britain ; so Gari- 
baldi found Italy. The Hour when pregnant always brings 
forth her men. But men of what sort ? Shall this be 
sword-time, or shall it be God-in-People's time ? 

Issachar is slow, painfully ruminating; not at all con- 
scious that the man-angel of Sociality is growing through his 
flesh to possess and transform his earthy and pauperised 
naturehood. Yet the heredities of Naseby fight, and Bunker 
Hill contest, move by evolutionary lines toward his social re- 
organisation. The persistences that were in Washington 
and John Brown penetrate to possess him : they are 
marching on. 

The Bucolic Intellect as we have seen is slow : it is the 
contact of minds that evolves intelligence ; that generates 
the passion of intelligence. Yet if slow, it is retentive. If 
the man of eighty still votes for Jackson, it is that he 
cherishes the patriotic memories of 1815. If the man of six- 
ty casts his ballot in the pathetic remembrance of Lincoln, 
it is that he recalls the imperilled Union and the great up- 
rising of the People. If he holds to his ecclesiastical tra- 
ditions, it is because he or his fathers found God in the 
traditions. He is not yet aware that Divinity, felt from of 



T H E N E W R E PUBLIC. T-J 

old through the frozen mists of antiquity, throbs now, heaves 
now, leads movement now in the infinitude of evolution. 
He is hardly able yet to "catch on;" his habits are con- 
stant and they operate to the constancy of his prejudices. 
His Eden is localised and bounded in the far, dim Past ; 
but this is only till his humane passions are fired and his 
brain illumined and fed by the on-coming lights of the 
Social Future. 

Yet meanwhile the environments, in which our Yeoman- 
ry found if not opulence yet comfort and security, have 
insensibly changed, becoming oppressive and ruinous. They 
narrowed and still narrow ; they upgrow to floors of spikes 
and walls of thorns, and roofs that exclude the high, broad 
azure, and fashion the fetid ceilings of the closed and fatal 
prison room. The Yeomanry sleep in the tradition of Liber- 
ty, whilst round them weave and fasten the ligatures of the 
slave. The politician duped them by deceptive promises ; 
they. served the purposes of his Party; they believed in it 
as the lover in his mistress, and the devotee in his God. 
They are only cured of the infatuation as they awake to 
find the franchises of their existence lost ; their inheritance 
divided between the middle-man, the railway-man, the cor- 
nerer and the mortgagee. If our Yeomanry wakes now, it 
is because Plutocracy has thrust in the knife ; the deeper 
the knife is thrust in, the more they will awaken. When 
the vitals are pierced they will emerge ; gaunt, ghastly, but 
terrible and inexorable. 

The life of the individual monads of the race, when left to 
the sluggish motion of the rural solitude, is too brief for the 
serious maturities of Wisdom. Courting time, mating time, 
brooding time ; then care time, ponderous, anxious, with 
recurrent troubles of disease and bereavement ; then wast- 
ing, withering, decay ; — it is all too brief. We are birds 



30 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

that hatch and warble and circle round our tree for the 
short leafy season. Never till the nests begin to be broken 
up, and the food to fail, and the shots of the slaughterers to 
penetrate, and the trees to tremble for the blows of the axe- 
man will the flights commence to apprehend that the dooms 
have overtaken them. 

When all is said in its favor that can be said, the life of 
the solitar} r farm homestead is still the survival of a barba-_ 
rism: its decline and end is a necessary process in the evo- 
lution of man from his petty and stolid naturehood. But 
the transition, that might be made heroic and exhilirating, is 
embittered, protracted and imperilled by the refusal of the 
Yeomanry to recognise and become adapted to the new con- 
ditions; — the refusal of the germ to grow; of the buried bulb 
to cleave the soil and meet the morning and lift the stalk 
and enlarge to its transfiguration in the solar flower. 

If men only knew ! — but they do not know. Those who 
know and who bear witness must bear the penalty of this 
refusal to be instructed. Yet those who witness will not be 
alone in-the sufferings. In times of denial it is not Jesus on- 
ly who must endure the cross : it is also the sons and sires, 
the mothers and daughters of Jerusalem; toward whose walls 
the legions are marching, for whose temple and whose homes 
the torches bicker, for whose honors awaits ruin, for whose 
limbs the chain. Education is through agonies. 



Our Nation, identified as it is with the larger form of Civil- 
isation, is a mere thought bubble, custom bubble, propriety 
bubble, suspended in the general atmosphere of the egoised 
barbaric passions ; the latent, repressed, resultant persist- 
ences of the old cruel ages when lust and violence held an 
unrestrained dominion. Old Napoleon said of the cultured 



T II E N E W K EPUBLIC. 31 

Russ, "prick his skin and you find the barbarian." So of 
the decorous, moralised, conventional naturehood of the 
American Civilizee ; parasite, producer, plutocrat, — prick 
the skin and we touch the savage still. 

But this is not the savage of the stone age ; it is the sci- 
entific savage of the age of steel, of dynamite, of electricity, to 
whom the exploitage of his fellow-man is a fine art, organ- 
ised in his religions of enmity, glozed and defended in his 
literatures of hypocrisy and subterfuge. And his empire 
is built up as great Babylon, with hanging gardens on the 
mountain chains, from the belts of ice to the zones of end-* 
less summer, prouding gaily to the faces of the outside 
oceans and inland seas ; and with palaces and pleasances, 
and ways of swiftness and magnificence that touch from cir- 
cle to circle over a dominion such as from of old the world 
has never seen. And to the vision of the ancient seer all 
the glory of great Babylon that he beheld, in one hour came 
to nought. And in another hour of unfeared and sudden 
doom this too may perish ! 

For the life and duration of all this is suspended on that 
which to the natural touch is absolutely nothing. It rests 
on an opinion, a stupor, an acquiescence, a consensus 
of repression among its quivering masses. The persist- 
ences of the heredities of all savage and barbaric ages, all 
appetences of murders, all lusts of acquisition or revenge, 
all greeds of spoliation and rapine exist, partially dormant, 
chained in by superficial opinion, custom and policy : they 
exist as latent forces in the human naturehood : the divine- 
hood that exists and operates through common man has 
thus long and partially held them in coercion. 

Now it is the advantage of the great body of the toiling 
Yeomanry and of the working Proletariat, born to the cot- 
tage and the manger as it is, that it escapes the curse that 



SZ THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

issues through the loins of the Oppressor, the cruel birth- 
right of ill-gotten hereditary riches. It was spoken by 
the Wisdom that was of old, "how hardly shall they that 
have riches enter into the kingdom of God : " even so, how 
hardly shall those who are the children of the ill-gotten riches, 
and who inherit into the inhumanities of their acquisition, 
enter into that holy home and paradise of social man. They 
are born into the kingdom of unjust Mammon ; their 
structural lines are fashioned, their instincts are organised, 
not in the sympathies of humanity ; but in the antipathies, 
the animosities, the inversions of humanity. They are born 
into the vortex of the inhumanities ; born to float gaily in 
the gilded barges that ride upon the death-stream of the 
martyred, toiling race. 

It is a wonder of God in evolution that the offspring of 
the human tiger and tigress should, nevertheless, inherit in- 
to so much of the surviving qualities of the truly human 
infant. A wonderful thing that they so retain a survival 
of the divinity in their tender flesh, that they may still hold 
to a thread or thrill of connection that makes it possible for 
them to be over-watched by "the angels of the Father, who 
is in heaven. " 

"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own : 
Yearning she hath in her own natural kind, 
And, even with something of a mother's mind 

And no unworthy aim, 
The homely nurse doth all she can, 
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man, 

Forget the glories he hath known, 
And that imperial palace whence he came." 
Thus Wordsworth in his immortal ode. But it is as the 
private self, nature born, nature fashioned, nature filled, 
naturally insatiate, closes in upon the tender essence of the 



1 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 33 

inmost and real humanhood, that the glories of the divine 
origin are obliterated, and the lamps of the imperial palace 
vailed from sight. 

Nevertheless the child, in a large natural sense, is father 
to the man. Oppressors beget minions and representatives 
of oppression, till the line of the exalted and exclusive rich, 
marrying and inter-marrying with its own kind, becomes 
impotent ; wasting and failing in scrofula and idiocy. Wher- 
ever a strong great man is found, in whom the social pas- 
sion makes its assertion by thoughts and works that serve 
to the liberation and enrichment of the People, it will be 
discovered that a glowing and opulent stream of People's 
life mingled with kindred streams for the due uplifting of 
structures into fitting lines of personality. What wealth of 
unexplored riches, what latent heroisms and nobilities await 
the happier times, for issuance from the People's womb ! 

It is claimed that the ordinary man of toil is ignorant; 
that he has much to learn. Granted ; and this is to his 
disadvantage. But he has not so much to unlearn as the 
heir of Opulence, cultured in the egoised ethics and science 
and philosophy of the universities, in the history that is 
misinterpreted, and in the literatures that are diseased and 
deceitful. "As the twig is bent the tree is inclined." It 
is only those stout twigs of patrician birth that were so root- 
ed and strengthened in the nobler heredity of the People 
that they would not bend, and indeed could not be made to 
bend, that hold to the upright aspect ; that rise gold-flow- 
ered and fruited, to ripen the generous wisdoms of man's 
inner and real nature. 

There is more profound, accurate, incisive social thought 
to-day among the French, the Belgian, the Swiss, the Ger- 
man, the British, the Australian, the American groups of 
artizans ; more, ten-fold, an hundred-fold, than in all the 
5 



34 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

pulpits, the counting houses, the editorial sanctums or uni- 
versities ; more grasp of the humane principles ; more knowl- 
edge of the actual trend of events. 

Let miracle be denied ; still this evolution of the divine 
qualities through man is by the law of the common and uni- 
versal miracle. The hereditary bondsmen of Toil, having 
comparatively none of the false knowledge to unlearn, are 
proving themselves wise in the culture that includes aH 
cultures, the ethics of Sociality. The groups of the Labor 
Unions are far in advance of the average groups of Congress 
men. Seat this young child of the People in the federal 
temple of the Nation, and the rabbis of the Senate will be 
astonished and confounded by his doctrine, for he will speak 
with the authority of scientific knowledge and experience, 
"and not as the scribes.'' 

And the reason why the millions of the artizans have al- 
most as a body abandoned the ministrations of ceremonial 
religion, is because they have a deeper and richer knowledge 
of the social ethics of Jesus of Nazareth ; a vaster and more 
penetrative comprehension of his mission and purpose, so 
far at least as this world is concerned, than is even dream- 
ed of by all but a few of the readers from the lectern or the 
celebrants of the altar. Even those of the German school, 
most agnostical in sentiment, possess an apprehension of 
the working methods of salvation which has almost become 
obliterated from the ecclesiastical consciousness. 

These dis-churched artizans are working right in the di- 
rection of Christ's work of public and organic righteousness : 
they are in the stream of Christ's sympathies ; they are fol- 
lowing on in the toil of Christ to institute the uplift from 
below; to base the opulence and magnificence of Earth, not 
as it is now based on desolations, robberies, destitutions, 
shames and miseries, but on the common fellowship and 



t 



T li E N E W BE PUBLIC, o 5 

sympathy and right dealing and honor between man and 
man. 

The uplift from below! consider this for a moment. There 
is no doubt that the uplift of general mankind, sought to 
be effected by ministrations through a class, distinct and 
working from above, is a failure. Nearly an hundred thou- 
sand of the elite of the youth of the nation, with liberal cul- 
ture, with the ethic and dogmatic of theology superadded, 
with exquisite moralities and social refinements, are set 
apart from each generation to preach "Christ crucified." 

They cannot agree as to who or what Christ was, or as to 
what constituted the seed-germs and working powers of his 
thought. As to his social ethics they for the most part ig- 
nore them : as to his social aims they agree that they are 
impracticable. They keep alive the traditions ; they per- 
petuate the visible form and service of the sacraments ; 
they minister to the luxuriousness of the religious senti- 
ment ; they assist to soothe the consciences and feed the spi- 
ritual hopes of the complaisant Plutocracy ; they serve to 
drill the morals and to throw a decent vail of saintly con- 
formity over the ebullient passions of the bourgeoisie. 

Their gospel reaches clean down, through the middle-men 
to the retainers and lackeys of Wealth's upper realm : it 
serves a public end for the consecration of the nuptial feast 
and for the obsequies of the departed. — It does more ; it 
serves to roll up the stone, to seal the doors of the sepulcher 
where sleeps the Martyred Man of Social Toil : it stands as 
sentinel at the gates, lest he should come forth in resurrec- 
tion 

We all know the valiant and worthful exceptions to this 
indictment. God will bless them ; and He hath blest. Yet 
the indictment we but repeat : it has been pronounced from 
their lips already. Bliss, Webster, Herron ; — the roll-call 



36 t H E if E W R EPl'BLIC. 

may be led to hundreds like unto them. Yea and amen ! but 
where stand the others of the hundred thousand? So stood 
Parker and May and William Channing and hundreds 
with them, whilst the great American Church justified or 
extenuated the offence of chattel slavery. 



If American domestic servitude was, as Garrison declared 
it to be, "the sum of all villanies," what shall be said of 
the system of Wage Slaveries that has grown up to conti- 
nental enormity since its abolition. "Runaways hunted by 
dogs in the cane-brakes of the Mississippi!" — Yes, but how 
about the troops of white girls, in those logging camps of 
Michigan, hunted by blood-hounds when they rush to escape 
from the nightly outrage of their persons that is perpe- 
trated there ? 

What shall be said of the tens of thousands of educated 
and virtuous young ladies, who perish annually from con- 
sumptive diseases, passing to their poor pallets from at- 
tendance on such opulent sales rooms as those of conspic- 
uous millionaires, but too well known ? They are used up 
and worn out with less consideration than is afforded to 
the beasts of carriage. They perish from excess of toil and 
insufficient nourishment. 

Again how about this " right of seigniorage" ? How about 
these tens and hundreds of thousands of young women of 
our own complexion, who to retain their places in sales room 
or work room and to escape being cast out to unemployed 
destitution, are compelled to "stand in with the boss," with 
all the personal defilement and degradation that the vile 
phrase implies ? 

A wealthy clothing merchant, the supporter of a popular 
church in one of the important cities of Ohio, privately told 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. .'17 

his story, having previously reformed his habits. It was 
to the effect that in the years of his business during which 
he had "lived up to his opportunities," nearly one thousand 
of virgins and widows to whom he supplied work had found 
it necessary to "stand in" with him. 

We talk religiously of free will, but the Manufacturing 
and Employing Plutocrat knows how to coerce free will ; to 
hurl down free will beneath the grinding wheels of orga- 
nised and imperious necessity. The "great city Babylon" 
stamps whoso would buy or sell within her gates by "the 
mark of the beast in the forehead." Wearing that mark, 
in the full front and power of his authority, the man of the 
mark burns it in again on the brow and breast of the 
helpless daughters of the People. Yet the purities are mur- 
dered in the pure, the innocences stolen from the innocent, 
and "no man lays it to heart." 

The church of the Plutocracy is dumb : its womanhood 
is dumb : its subsidised and universal public press is dumb. 
These are things that Society will not tolerate to be spoken 
of, and which when spoken of are commonly denied. 

How again about the tens or hundreds of thousands of 
needle women, hand workers, machine workers ; the never- 
ending ghastly procession that empties its wasted annual 
surplusage into the streets, into the dives, into the hospi- 
tal and the pauper's grave? Is this America, a continent 
of the earthly planet, open through clear azure to sun and 
stars ; or has it sunken down — its dwellers unaw r are — and 
become re-incorporated in the seemings of a world for a 
new and thrice infernalised Pandemonium? 

Every hour so many of these, our sisters, drop through 
spoil and outrage into ruin, yet we are comparatively at the 
beginning ; for with every hour the multitude of helpless, 
impoverished, unprotected womanhood increases, through- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 



out the length and breadth of the land. With every hour 
the mighty host of the Despoiler adds to its ranks by fit and 
chosen neophytes and associates, eager and fired and pant- 
ing for the prey. 



A luminous thinker of the middle years of the 18th cen- 
tury wrote, " All things stand prepared and ready, and await 
the light." The light dawned : it led the evolution by twin 
streams of scientific invention and humane culture and 
assertion. Unhasting, unresting, it brings all obsolete, 
outworn, impedimental customs, opinions, institutions ; 
all environments of mankind, into judgment before the 
tribunal of the divinehood that shapes to fashion in the 
humanity of man. But now it may be written again, 
"All things stand prepared and ready, and await the fire :" 
not the torch of the Insurrectionist, but the ardors of Liv- 
ing Evolution, led to their enkindling wisdom in the social 
passion of the Peoples. 

It has been claimed by one school of liberal thinkers, 
that the evils of the Present are not so much more than 
those of the Past, but that we see them more. — Even so ; 
and we see them more because they are being led up to 
confront the Divine Tribunal in the formative social hu- 
manhood, and to receive the sentence, "Depart!" We too, 
who ponder together in this strange hour of the fate-time, 
are involved, from living flesh to living soul, in the full 
round of its tremendous issues : Ave too feel the momentum 
of the massive forms that wheel on, on to judgment : we 
too, as we survive, must incorporate our futures in the bliss 
or woe. 



THE NEW HE PUBLIC. 39 

V. 

There is at present, throughout the human area of our 
Nation, a movement which for lack of some better term may 
be designated as an " incipient evolutionary whirl ;" a current 
of vital force, energised in the flowing stream of the out-work- 
ing social passion. This may be traced through three dis- 
tinct channels of operation. 

The first whirl-current operates for the diffusion of the im- 
pulse of collectivity, for its method, firmness, sympathy and 
influence, through the vast body of artizans and common 
laborers. It is impregnating the Trades Unions with the 
socialistic fire, but embodies its more virile force, its more 
effective motion of intelligence, in the distinctive State So- 
cialists, whose organ of service is the Socialistic Labor Party. 

The visible fount of this movement was originally from 
abroad. Germany, the focus of the world's philosophic 
culture, was the first, more than a quarter of a century ago, 
to evolve the formulas of a strictly logical and scientific evo- 
lution of organised industry, that should merge individual- 
ism in collectivity. 

The distinguished Karl Marx was the first of thinkers to 
work out the problem in the logic of inductive reason : he 
announced beforehand the main features of the march of 
the competitive system through trusts and syndicates to the 
huge capitalistic monopolisation that exists to-day. More, 
he clearly defined the law whereby competition whirls on 
into a final result of combination, and hence the crash, the 
chaos of our present industrial fabric as the ensuing conse- 
quence. State Socialism must not be confounded with the 
imported Anarchism : they are as opposite in spirit, method 
and result as order is opposed to anarchy. 

The second whirl of evolution circulates mainly through 



40 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

the professional, artistic, literary classes, the exceptionally 
humane of the bourgeoisie and thence to the isolated yeo- 
manry. This movement was begotten in the old Socialism 
of cultured New England, surviving still from the labors of 
William Henry Channing, George Ripley and the band of 
exceptionally gifted men and women who were comprised 
in the "American Union of Associationists" 45 years ago : 
it is ideal, reverent, cultured, sympathetic and humanitarw. 
These old associationists were brim full of patriotic faith 
and courage ; possessed of the modern spirit. Their one 
deficiency was in the lack of apprehension of the laws of 
industrial organisation and environment, which Avere after- 
wards formulated in the German school. 

To Mr. Laurence Gronlund must be given the honor by 
his treatise, "the Co-operative Commonwealth," published 
some seven or eight years since, of being the first to intro- 
duce to the general American thought this missing factor, 
necessary for the evolutionary advance. "Written from full 
knowledge of the logical ground and mastery of the facts 
of the material situation; written with the naive honesty of 
the child yet with the ripe wisdom of the scholar in his 
specialty, this and his subsequent productions, though of 
comparatively limited circulation, served as the Euclid of 
social mathematics. 

This and kindred literature supplied the base on which 
Mr. Edward Bellamy reared his popular and far-appreciated 
structure. In that now almost world-famous prevision it 
seemed to many that "Golden Jerusalem"— always luminous 
above the clouds of the mental firmament — was seen de- 
scending to a solid foundation established for it upon ma- 
terial soil. Yet "Looking Backward" would have fallen 
dead upon an apathetic Public had not the vital whirl of 
evolution opened channels for its reception in the Popular 



THE NEW R.EPU BLIC. 41 

brain and bosom. 

The Arabian prophet affirmed that, "God sends to every na- 
tion a prophet in its own tongue." He sent to Germany Karl 
Marx and Lassalle, and to America the accurate, thorough 
Gronlund, and our own genial and hopeful Bellamy. But 
more, to these last annunciators he sent audiences as well. 
They translated the unapparent to the evident : so men 
found bread in the dry sand where before they but tasted 
stones ; they met water-springs where before they had parch- 
ed in the hot dust of the desert. So the whirl of evolution 
found access and Social Nationalism rose to a swift and 
auspicious prominence. 

But there is in evolution a third whirl ; a mighty one. 
though hidden as a river of the night. It is in the class 
raised by mental and industrial prowess, by extreme 
wealth — often hereditary wealth — to dignity, power, exclu- 
•siveness, sumptuosity and luxury ; the centre and crown of 
existing Society. 

The same heart beats in the bosom of the man of a dol- 
lar a day and the man whose dollar is born anew to him 
every minute. There is the same hereditary private self 
grasping to the egoised interest, and within him the same 
latent social passion, pregnant with the riches of the Infinite 
and yearning to the birth, that it may pour abundance into 
the bosom of the Peoj)le. 

Poverties are burdens that heap care and agony upon 
the man of cruel and lonely toil : riches are burdens that 
lead to their humane possessor anxieties, sore misgivings, 
crises of conscience, questionings as to what is the right 
and wrong between rich and poor, employer and employee, 
the public treasury and the private purse ; — yea, what is the 
final right between opulence and God ? Here is a vast, 
deep-burdened heart that waits to be relieved : a vast brain 
6 



42 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

that begins to apprehend that infinite benignities may be 
dispensed from the halls and treasuries that have been 
made the shrines of Mammon. 

Humane Socialism is breathing on, feeling its way through 
the topmost class, and its movement there is in the strict 
order of evolution : it has taken up, all unobtrusively, a 
permanent abode. It has come, gloriously to demonstrate 
at no distant period that God's heartbeats full circle through, 
all classes and conditions of men. It is by no means im- 
probable that gentlemen of such types as Wm. and Corne- 
lius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Robert Garrett, Abram 
Hewitt, Charles Francis Adams, may yet stand full bold in 
the logic of Karl Marx, and the fruitful suggestions of 
Gronlund and Bellamy. There is an host of working men 
of combined skill and capital, employers of labor, but kind 
and considerate employers, men of conscience up to the 
measure of their light, who are ripening up to become the 
apostles and organisers of solidarity. 

" Of honorable women not a few !" — The cultured heiresses 
of Rome and Alexandria in the earlier Christian centuries 
exchanged jewels and purple and the service of slaves for 
the plain robes and sisterly avocations of the daughters of 
the People. We have yet to see full openings of the riches 
of social wisdom, devotedness and courage in the exclusive 
circles of our American Womanhood. It is simply igno- 
rance or misinformation as to the social ethic, and its infi- 
nite possibility of uplift and reconciliation and cleansing 
and nourishing, that holds them in quiescence now. 

This third stream of evolution throbs with a profound 
and even awful passion : eminently it is the Woman's whirl. 
It forms to the impulse that leads to the Episcopal Sister- 
hoods ; to nurse-service in the hospitals and among the 
lowly poor ; to the zeal and devotion of the "King's Daugh- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 43 

ters" and kindred societies of help and succor. It stirs 
like the approach of Advent in the bosom of the church 
that is sometimes described as "the aristocratic and capi- 
talistic porch of Zion :" it finds recent and warm access of 
partial utterance in the voice of prelates of that episcopate. 
It sets already two of its priesthood before the Public as 
founders or conductors of socialistic, nationalistic periodic- 
als, and their utterances are both sweet and considerate, 
both wise and brave. 

Let a preacher like Phillips Brooks fully comprehend 
and receive the God whom he adores and loves, as seeking 
to reach mankind again in this crisis-hour of its destiny 
through social evolution, and his utterance would rock the 
"Wealth Church" of the continent as if it were an infant's 
cradle : it would lead forth the land's proudest and most 
glorious daughters by tens of thousands. Where woman 
leads man is sure to follow : the path of this brave advance 
would be the Social Commonwealth. 

The Nation possesses an untitled but hereditary noblesse 
that is not to be confounded with rail-sharps, oil-thieves, 
coal-robbers and trade-pirates or their progeny. These are 
aristo, the best ; inheritors of the cultures, amenities and 
honors of families that greatened from old centuries by al- 
liances and assimilations of fiery-passioned heroic qualities of 
mind and heart. Adamses, Winthrops, Jays, Scburylers, 
Lees, Fitz-Hughs, Hugers, Desaussures ; blood of the May- 
flower, blood of '76, blood of Coligni's Huguenots, and Wil- 
liam the Silent's Netherlands, and Cromwell's and Milton's 
England tingles now in the veins of the Republic's fair and 
wise and brave. 

In these the worthier evolutions of the Past have sown 
and reproduced their seed : they hold in living structures the 
wealth of the grand achievements of the forefathers. It 



44 T H E N E W R E P U B L I ( ' . 

is through such that the evolutionary whirl, condensed, 
compressed, awaits to marshal forth by sword and lyre, by 
breasting, battling, organising symphonies. 



When the period of incubation is fulfilled the chick must 
pick the shell, or die. The Republic has accomplished its 
century of incubation : fashioned within this rigid shell of 
plutocratic environment, the system of a living People has 
grown to such completeness that the shell rocks and quivers 
with its agitation. The question is now, not whether the 
egg shall be gently eased to a posture in the nest that shall 
soothe the chick to a little longer period of quiescent repose, 
as the advocates of palliative and partial reforms, measures 
of political easement would enforce ; but whether the incu- 
bation shall fail and the dead egg explode from the degen- 
eration of vitalities into corruptions ? 

Previous and mighty civilisations have been abolished in 
the advance of decrepid age and the invasion of inherent, 
accumulative, catastrophic death. The civilisation of which 
this Nation is a part holds in its members, by means of the 
parasitical, retrogressive and venal classes, the age, the rot- 
tenness, the decline, the dissolution that shed forth to ruin 
for the proud empires of antiquity. The rot of Rome diffuses 
through our parties and the rot of Egypt prostitutes in our 
palaces and on our streets. We hold, in a suppression that 
rapidly becomes insuppressable, the consequence of every 
old catastrophe. 

So the dead call to us, "come down, come down ! " Babylon 
calls from its sand-wastes upon the Euphrates ; Carthage 
and Tyre call from stony sepulchres beside the seas ; but 
within all this body of corruption the Young Nation stands, 
opulent with energies of evolution throughout its industrious 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 45 

masses, whether their toil be of heart or brain or hand. 

Essentially there are but two Parties, the Party of stag- 
nation and that of quickening ; the Party of corruption and 
that of purifying ; the Party of absolutism and that of lib- 
eration ; the Party of entombment and that of resurrection. 
And Evolution will advance ! though the orb lifted hand 
against the sun the motions of the heavens will not abate, 
even if the orb shall perish. Though our Nation lift hand 
against evolution, the evolution will ride on from conquer- 
ing to conquer; if not through us, with us and for us, then 
through us still, but against us : "whosoever falls upon that 
stone shall be broken ; but on whomsoever it shall fall it 
will grind him to powder." 

But we shall not fall. The embodiment of divine hu- 
man principle fashioned in the vital constituents of this 
American People ; however tried, however tortured, is not 
thus to perish. " In Hoc Signo Vinces." 

VI. 

So far as they conform to the style of naturehood and 
reject the law of humanhood, the Plutocratic Combina- 
tions and the associations of the Artizans and the Yeomanry 
possess an identity : motive, effort and end are the same ; 
a larger share of material wealth than can be secured by 
solitary action. Lacking the spirit of Collectivity, the best 
of them are partial, fragmentary and tentative. They or- 
ganise to fight, not to love ; organise in the principle of 
fight, not in the principle of love ; organise in the method 
of fight, not in the method of love. 

If the roll of membership is scanned, all tiie way from 
Syndicates to Trades Unions, three distinct types of charac- 
ter are apparent. The best type consists of men in whom 



46 THE NEW REPUBLIC). 

the genuine social humanhood is firm and assertive, on the 
uprise to birth. The worst type consists of egoised indi- 
vidualities, shells of aboriginal naturality ; creatures who 
" are on the make ;" to whom the affiliation serves for their 
purpose of make, present or prospective. Between is a 
middle type ; those who fluctuate, who drift, who are in- 
stabilities, impressibles ; who take on surfacely the alternate 
aspects of thought, the social and egoistical. Hence, not- 
withstanding appearances, there is in such associations no 
solidarity, for that implies a vital sympathy of passion and 
motive, flowing through all the members, each of whom 
serves as a factor and motor for the one organic end. 

It was the contention of Lassalle, whose thought has per- 
meated the mass of European socialists, that the populace 
of hand toilers constitutes the vital body of the People, to 
the exclusion of the classes. This may easily be shown to 
be a fallacy, that whilst it operates renders nugatory for 
final good the vast schemes of the Proletariat. The vital 
body of a Nation consists of those of its inhabitants who 
are vitalised into the passion, thought and action of their 
real humanhood. The drifts, the natural ignobles are, till 
born over, mere parasites upon that living body politic. 

It is not 's millions but his inhuman rapacity 

that excludes him from the living body of the People : it 
is not Jacques Miner's handling of coal ; it is his holding 
into God for the possession and out-work of the humanly 
divine, that makes him a member of the People's corporate 
structure : for the Living Nation is the corporate body of 
God, and those are its members who are nourished and who 
nourish their fellow members in the flesh and blood of the 
divine humanity. 

Another and equally prejudicial fallacy is, that the meas- 
ure of a man's service is the sum of his product of material 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 47 

values. Now the law of naturehood is as Wordsworth phras- 
ed it for Rob Roy ; 

"For why? because the good old rule 
Sufficeth them ; the simple plan. 

That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 
Each natural creature subsists by the appropriation of 
nutritive substance from other lives, though those perish ; 
but the law of Humanhood is gift. The man who from 
core to skin is warmly alive in the passions of his human- 
hood is a factor of forces to his fellows. As one of a group 
the sum of his productive toil is not to be measured by the 
chaldrons of coal that stand to his credit when the day's 
labor is complete. All the days he is a cordial ministrant 
to his fellows, and they have partaken of the essence and 
the substance of his powers by an unconscious but actual 
sacrament. He has given himself into them for strength 
of toil or skill of hand, for hope of heart and persistence of 
virtue. Illustrations of this law may be found everywhere 
if sought by the single eye. Hence there are men whose 
energies for productive wealth are multiplied ten-fold, an 
hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, yet the visible result of 
whose material toil may be less than that of the inferior 
members of the groups in whom they consociate. 

Again, there are working men who boast of an ability to 
compete with or excel the most handy of their mates, yet 
who to a large degree are parasites, feeding for the sub- 
stance of energy upon generous, humane lives that are thus 
exploited. For the man of gift to toil where he is exposed 
to bodily rapport with the absorbtive man of greed is for 
him to be abated in force and length of days. There is an 
exploitage of the masses that proceeds by their own para- 
sites, and Toil can never be liberal and free till delivered 



48 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

from its incubi. Any system of association that provides 
for the equality and contact of the incubi in the Industrial 
Commonwealth involves the perpetuation of the more vital 
theft, 

The vital body of the Nation consists thus of its human- 
ly productives : as the tree so the fruit ; as men lift into the 
ripe wealth of humanhood they will bear fruit, each after 
his specialty, more and more abundantly. And the toil of 
the man is as his days are : he is not to be an exempt when 
his clays have reached or passed the meridian : this to him 
would be slavery, suppression, misery. "My Father work- 
eth hitherto, and I work." Service is made divine as man 
enters into it by the motive and in the steps of God : no 
brand of serfdom can mar that calm, high brow or efface 
the kingliness that crowns thereon. 

Doubtless, according to the law and purpose of their as- 
sociation, it Avas reasonable for the Labor Unions to esta- 
blish such rules as that no workman should take a double 
step on the ladder, or carry more than the regulation num- 
ber of bricks in the hod, or make the hours of labor a min- 
ute more than the order, or put in more strokes, or turn 
out better value of work in the day than his less qualified 
mates. Yet, for all this, it was degrading : it fettered the 
liberties of the free and prompt intelligence ; it set the 
rank and file of Labor in a come chain : it sought to bind 
the Spirit of evolution in man. There is a better way : 
it is not too late to seek it now. 

It may be well for the great Oil Magnate to say, "this 

sentiment has no place in business ; if I get a rival in a hole 
I mean to keep him there ; " but it will not do for one to 
say it who esteems the virtue and honor of his manhood, 
whatever may be the pursuit: for "sentiment," if by this 
we understand the flow of the divine sympathies of human- 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 49 

ity, has place in every business, unless that business is 
meant to be degraded through the bestial into the diaboli- 
cal. We are here to abolish the diabolism of rivalry ; to 
lift rivalry into the swift step and daring march and kindly 
supporting touch of kindred excellences. It is not when 
he receives the day's wage that the man is degraded ; it is 
when he serves for the purpose of pay : man honors and 
nourishes his manhood as he serves for love. 

After all that can be said, the man who is solidified into 
the egoistic instinct and its private greeds, feels within him- 
self a stronger, though delusive motive for the perpetuation 
of environments that suppress the social passion, and that 
give full licence within law for the enormous satisfaction 
and aggrandisement of the naturehood, than can be com- 
pensated for in any form of really humanised institutions. 
Man's life is in his desires, and his delights are by the 
measure of their satisfactions. 

The delights of gratified pride to the self whose life is in 
pride ; of gain to the self whose life is in gain ; of conten- 
tion and triumph and the out-witting and over-po'tt-ering 
of rivals to the self whose life is in battle against competi- 
tors ; the delight of a wicked ruler in his rule ; of the satan of 
the press in his power to extort homage and inflict pain and 
enforce fear ; of the party boss in the intrigue, the adroit 
wheedling of the public, the massing of the simple, honest 
commonalty in the service of his fraud ; the satisfaction of 
the glorying, the perpetual oblations to his inhuman self- 
praise and self-conceit, — these make to such the chief things 
that life is worth living for. Now, Society in its present 
form is a wisely calculated and prudently guarded system for 
the outlet and satisfaction of the egoistic lusts. Those in 
whom the lusts rule, and who rule by the lusts, would rather 
see the Republic bathed in blood and the People rent to 
7 



50 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

fragments, than that this huge Corporeal Lusthood of en- 
vironments should be pierced by the knife, or constricted 
by the chain. 

"Lay not this nattering unction to thy soul, Horatio! " 
No ruling majority in the school of Mr. Bellamy can draw 
out this leviathan by the hook. The voting conies may 
combine, but they have not yet done with the tiger. For 
this would be, by one master-stroke, to upset the constitu- 
tion of human affairs as History has written it, and to estab- 
lish a result, which the clearest eyes that ever shone in man 
could only glimpse as possible through the separation of 
the social sheep from the egoised and savage wolves. Yes, 
our Brother, whom we reverence as "the Light of the World," 
saw order realised in the associative life of the human mul- 
titude ; but this effected by a clean cutting through : those 
of the gift-service led by the attractions to the awaiting 
destinies ; those of the greed-service left to their congenial 
anti-social combination . What may be the processes through 
which the evolution will operate for the Events that hasten 
on we may not fore-know. One thing we do know : the 
Master who foretold beheld the race cleaving apart ; its liv- 
ing humankind emergent from its deadly and corrupting 
inhumanities. 

Yet again, if our humanhood is thus to burst the shell 
of its naturality, it is "not to destroy but to fulfil," and to 
infill. The scaffolding drops that the temple may stand forth 
in its sublime proportions. Cast through what fierce heat, 
uplifted by Avhat supreme endeavor, the matrix opens to 
disclose the statue of the god. Have we not a logical as- 
surance for the faith, that all things serve the purpose of an 
infinite economy ; that there is no final waste or loss in man ? 

May not this mass of incipient manhood, closed in the 
constrictive ego, fettered to the bondage of self-generated 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 5] 

lusts, incapable of submission to the superior passion 
whilst that was dulled from its flame, chilled from its heat, 
restrained from its operation by the oppression of the General 
Ego, rampant in the lusthood of malign environments ; — 
may not even this find a new impulse of generation through 
the generous, genial potence of the Uplifted Social Man? 
May not the birth-crisis of the New Republic precede and 
lead on to the fulness and freedom of a new mankind? 
May not the evolution be fulfilled in the reign of universal 
harmony; "the restitution of all things, spoken of by all 
God's holy prophets since the world began?" — The closed 
ages are behind us : the open ages are before. 



VII. 

The stronghold of Plutocratic Egoism is in the egoised 
Church, which proffers to its adherents an egoised and pri- 
vate salvation. Yet the religion of the church was formu- 
lated by the Socialist of socialists, as a means of grace for 
the uplifting of mankind into its vital and corporate hu- 
manhoocl. In origin, essence, method and purpose it was 
pure socialism ; its every sacrament a sociality. It was 
organised in the laAV of gift, antagonistic at every point 
to the anti-force of greed. Its message to every man, to 
every woman was, "Open inly to receive the social Christ 
of God : open outward for the diffusion of the social christ- 
hood throughout the race." 

Let us not condemn without discrimination. The with- 
ered beldame, standing on table-rock, stooping over Niagara, 
tea-spoon in hand ! see, she pities the poor drops whirling- 
down to their doom of "wrath to come :"she reaches out if 
haply some may be saved : she dips up spoonful after spoon- 
ful, drips them carefully into her row of tiny labelled vials 



02 'IVHE NEW republic!. 

and corks them in. — "For this and to this," they say, "God 
took on flesh, and was crucified, and burst the grave." 

State and Church ! the one is organised in the competi- 
tions of individualism for this world's gain : the other in 
the self-strife of egoised anti-social believers for the gains 
and guerdons of the other world. The one tends to the 
complete exploitage of the productive masses and is based 
upon their bonded service : the other tends to its own mag- 
nificent exclusiveness, as the private domain of enriched 
non-producers, middle class competitors and unreasoning 
superstitionists. Such is the two-fold structure of the Pub- 
lic environment. 

Now Socialism inhabits the Church as a nascent Hu- 
manhoocl, buried in an environment of naturality and 
struggling to expression. Therefore the visible ecclesiasti- 
cism has, notably for the last three centuries, evinced the 
process of a dissolution ; as a structure of mere naturehood 
evincing more and more of a divorce from the living body 
of the People ; depending as a vesture of superficialhvy upon 
its limbs ; clinging constrictively upon the popular thought 
and custom. 

We behold it at last invaded decisively by the evolution- 
ary whirl. First, the scientific doctrine of evolution has 
shattered the faith of the wise among its doctors in their 
historical and dogmatic cult. Second, the progress of re- 
search has weakened or overthrown their trust in the col- 
lective accuracy and authority of its sacred oracles. Third 
the truth of the Divine immanence in mankind is supplant- 
ing the creed of Deus ex machina ; the high, outside God, 
throned above the universe, and a stranger to the vitalised 
interiors of human heart and flesh. Hence the latent force- 
currents of the divine evolution are loosening its massed 
and pent-up multitudes, through differentiation toward so- 



T HE NEW REPUBLl C . 51 1 

cial personality. 

So the Ecclesiastical System which whilst it represents re- 
ligion, now in the main misrepresents religion, is struggling 
for existence, and yet for transformation. The few of its 
strong authorities are feeling their way to the Social Christ, 
in the rise of the social passion, and by the hope and labor 
of the social good : the many are holding as did the rabbis 
of the Jewish cult against the advance of the Nazarene. 
Yet again, Religion, so long in thrall of ceremonial but ig- 
noble naturehood, is taking heart and finding breath anew 
in the body of the vital People. Priest and Levite pass by on 
the other side, but Religion re-affirms her healing potence, 
instituting her new priesthood of the Good Samaritan. 

Throughout the vast labyrinth of the sacerdotal and com- 
mercial Babylon the voice of Evolution in warning is trum- 
peting, "Come out of her, my People, that ye receive not 
of her plagues ! " Fifty years ago the name of " Come-outer " 
was a term of derision, applied to lonely protestants against 
the defiant and popular iniquity: now the come-outers are 
becoming the People, and the stay-in ners are beleagured in 
their strong city by assembling hosts. Gage and his red 
coats still hold the Boston of our hope, but the Continen- 
tal Army is assembling and entrenching from hill-side to 
hill-side, the farmer from his plow, the artizan from the 
shop and smithy: Revolution becomes organic. 

As evolution still advances we see fhe Sects dividing into 
thinking, worshiping personalities. Men stood only as they 
were held together in close grip of tribal and churchly fam- 
ilisms: they fell to weakness as they held apart. Now they 
find strengths rise with the assertion of liberty ; strengths 
intensify with the assertion of equality ; strengths multi- 
ply with the assertion of fraternity : from this grand emi- 
nence they look on to the supreme might in organised 



54 THE NEW RE PUB LIC. 

divine society. The cry is everywhere, "more room, more 
room !" the old habit stifles. It would be impossible to 
compress men into the limits that held them half a century 
ago ; or if forced to that compression it would be to them 
as the black hole of Calcutta. 

The egoised individual mind clings, by the love of life, 
to Nature as a ground of surface-hold and delight, and this 
appetency is denounced by the religionist as a profane world- 
liness. When Garrick exhibited to Dr. Johnson his superb 
gallery of art, the grim moralist exclaimed, "Ah, Davy, Davy ! 
these are the things that make a death-bed terrible." The 
young birds love their sheltering tree, and though the sum- 
mer is ended and the leaves fallen they shrink from the 
unknown flightways through the far, dim azure. But man 
is a creature of enduring hope ; so the ego knowing that the 
cling here must fail, mounts aloft by a self-longing for pri- 
vate possession and pastime, in an other-worldliness, that it 
deems religious yet which is still profane. 

Hence comes the delusion of the Pharisee : transferring 
the self-grip of the ego to that other world, he "thanks God 
that he is not as other men, or even as this Publican," who 
delights in creature good and makes his holding-j)lace and 
joy-realm here. The pharisee thinks to be wise in his gen- 
eration : he will not "carry all his eggs in one basket;" so 
that, when the lower basket drops and its eggs are broken, 
he may float high, bearing the other basket, with eternal 
prospect of chicks and omelets in store. He "is not as this 
publican." 

Now the religion of the social passion translates the hope 
and trust of man from self-righteousness to the divine right- 
eousness, made social righteousness in the accordant human 
race. To the man of real religion the assumptions of self- 
righteousness are horrible. He conceives of God as im- 



THE N E W REPUBLIC. 55 

manent in mankind, condescendent to its extremest needs ; 
lifting in mankind, and hence lifting him personally, not as 
one selected out by an especial favoritism, but lifting him, 
in the accordance of the universal law and purpose, by just 
so much as he is divested of all self-striving ; abolishing that 
private strife that he may become a factor and function in 
the general and social uplift of man. 

No man was ever saved by means of a private and exclusive 
striving to save himself: no man was ever lost who merged 
his being, with all its interests and efforts, in the organisa- 
tion of the Public Safety. There is and can be no religion 
in individualism pure and simple : the private monad can 
hold no religion : absolute religion is absolute socialism. 
As religions grow into reality and fruitfulness, they become 
more social : as they deaden and become sterile the} r grow 
egoistic, and egotistic, and time-serving, and persecuting, and 
mendacious, and fraudulent, and parasitical, and infernal. 

It is not the priest and levite who embody and show 
forth Religion, though each is in full succession from Mosaic 
orthodoxy, and though each "thanks God that he is not as 
other men ;" — it is the "Good Samaritan, " who thanks God 
that he is as other men; that, sinner as he is, he can yet 
feel in the common sympathy, and assist in the common 
helpfulness, and so serve to bind up the wounds of the 
fallen kinsman, whom priest and levite have left to perish 
in the wilderness. 



Never before so much of the Gift Spirit, yet never such 
aggrandised and insistent greed ! the more the man who has 
found his humanhood differentiates and enlarges, so much 
the more the fervid social passion takes grandeur and op- 
ulence in his heart. Yet the more the individual has fired 



Ot> THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

and fixed his appetences in the constitution of naturehood, 
the more the harsh, constrictive determinations of the pri- 
vate self clutch his faculties into inhumanity, ravage and 
destroy the generous sensibilities and set the mark of the 
beast upon his brow. 

Now the charm that modern life has for strong characters 
of this inhuman type, consists in the fact that the planet 
has been thrown open, that wherever spoil is to be found 
they are free to venture ; and that the men of push and dar- 
ing were never so armed and equipped for the spoilage as 
is now. Depend upon it, our Csesarsare not to be disarmed 
by any Senate or impeded by any Rubicon. How great 
has Bismarck grown by his mastery of the opportune, yet 
how contemptible ! an empire of savants, philosophers, 
scientists, men of charming culture and illustrious art, held 
by him of less account than household lackeys, and scribes 
of his reptile press. And we too have our petty Bismarcks, 
great in all but in that which remains to him of a faded, 
tarnished luster. Nay, Plutocracy, in its thousand mil- 
lionaires, knit to one ever-hardening, ever-solidifying, ever- 
concentrating Gold-Colossus, master-piece upon the board 
of Evil Destiny, holds more than Bismarckian dare and 
dash ; more command of press and legislature ; more abso- 
lute knowledge of what to do, and how and wherefore and 
to what end the doing must serve, than he. The modern 
opportune leads strong men of greed to unknown bulk and 
bight of evil greatness : then the zeit geist enforces their 
consolidation, and mankind is their spoil : it is broken at 
their feet. 

Yet if there is on earth a new race of giants, their path 
is disputed by "offspring of the gods." Men heard the call, 
"be oriented!" and lifted brow and bosom to the morn's in- 
telligence. Again the call, "be orbed!" so they round 



T HE N E W R E P U B LI C . 57 

to englobed, irradiated spheres of living reason. Now at 
last the summons, "be constellated!" orb after orb they 
swing to find their place and function in the ascending so- 
cial solidarity. Are the human heavens silent still ? So- 
cialism shall yet lead mankind into her march of harmony 
by the music of the spheres. 

But as men thus orb and constellate they brighten : the 
mind becomes more mental ; the senses more sensitive ; the 
passions more passionate ; the endurances more enduring 
and persistent. The attractions attract and the repulsions 
repulse, by chords that rise in the rhythm of evolution. 

If our pseudo "civilisation was nothing if not artificial," 
yet its nothingness becomes apparent as it is found to be 
artificial : its doom is written, in that it is not humanly but 
artificial. The firmest of artificial alliances are proving un- 
able to withstand the evolutionary currents that wheel the 
quickening and orbing lives into the association of their fit- 
nesses by the attraction of concurrent sympathies. 

The great, free Social Manhood is yet to come. The la- 
tent potence of our humanhood is evidenced in the fact that 
the intuitive sympathies of the race are in accord with real 
greatness. Social Nationalism, notwithstanding its material 
promise, is distrusted, because of the apprehension that its 
establishment may lead to the creation of a race of compla- 
cent and fatted mediocrities : it is always the level that is 
wearisome and monotonous. 

The race cannot survive, lighten or enjoy in the default 
of its brilliant characters : however clear the lamp-light 
still the heart hungers for the stars. Yet man by his hu- 
manhood is a being of infinite variety : the characteristic 
of real genius is that it is instinctively socialistic. All the 
dramatists are in Shakspere : all the humanists are in Christ : 
it is the social passion that liberates the special genius in 
8 



58 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

eacli demonstrative and creative man. Those mighty Bre- 
thren of the Past, who wrought forth the idea of their life 
into splendor and fruitfulness because the social passion 
was energetic within.them, — they stand before us, they beck- 
on on, as if to say, "The social passion of the race made its 
tabernacle within us : this was the foundation and this the 
greatness of our labors. Ripening through growths of lat- 
ter ages, the social passion waits to tabernacle and achieve 
in you." 

Yet Humanity is only for the human ; its socialism only 
for the social. Our Nation is dominated and overcrowded 
by its dwarfs : the misfortune is, that the dwarfed heart, 
mind, sensation, imagination, faith and trust are made the 
measure beyond which, whoever transcends is made a mark 
for distrust, denial ; almost an outcast among men. 

Still, if the age greatens and men do not greaten with it. 
this is because they egoise against the greatness. If the age 
deepens and men do not deepen with it, it is because they 
shallow themselves that they may hide away in their petti- 
nesses from the tides of the on-coming deep. So, if men 
egoise whilst the age seeks to socialise, it is because the pri- 
vate self shrinks from the heroic pursuits, the disciplines, 
the darings that make for the vast human good. The more 
vital part of the human faculties are in perpetual eclipse. 
Egoism holds but at most the lunar light : the richer worths 
of the solar ray are lost to us because it is only by means 
of the social passion that the bosom attracts and absorbs 
the human aura of the sun. 

The great men of the Egoists are but brazen and pillared 
mediocrities. Egoism severs the tap-root of the human tree. 
Observe any coterie of Club-men or Turf-men, or Bank or 
Railway magnates, or Cabinet Ministers ; on the whole they 
are miserable. Their enjoyments are coarse and feverish : 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 50 

they inhabit an atmosphere of suspicions. They journey 
at a swinging gait, hut this is because they ride the croco- 
dile : they see their ruined rivals trodden beneath the feet 
of the beast, and they know that the rivals rode once where 
they ride now : they know too that a twist, of the reins, a 
slip of the foot, a careless motion may hurl them down to 
be as the rivals are. 



Paradise is in the air : the atmosphere of our social hope 
is impregnated by diffused elysium. This utterance pro- 
ceeds in that promise ; but there is also an air of terror. 
The toiling masses of the People can be led through miser- 
ies, disappointments, ruinous calamities : on, to a certain 
point, they may be driven by their task-masters like cattle 
toward the shambles. Starvation of the body, starvation 
of mind, heart and hope ; starvation that with spectral 
shadowing extinguishes the fire of the 'hearth and slays the 
comfort of the bed ; that smites the babe upon its mother's 
bosom and shrouds at last that mother for the grave ; — this 
in its long approaches is endured, but in the last extreme it 
loosens the passion of revenge, the desperation of ruin that 
is latent in the naturality of man : it leads forth a storm of 
mania that is the opposite of the evolutionary whirl. 

When the cry is heard, " Bread or blood !" the Plutocratic 
Rulers may well tremble. This is not so far off, by the law 
of the alternative, but that quickening senses may now feel 
it tingling toward them. If all the promise of the past is 
latent in our Nation for the evolution of its social human- 
hood, the savagisms, the barbarisms of all that past lie latent 
in its animalised cupidities. Coiled like gigantic serpents, 
they wait, if roused and unfettered, to whirl forth upon the 
land in all the power and deadliness of wrath that is im- 



60 T H E If E W R E P tJ B L I C . 

plied in such enormous heredities. Then reason is no- 
where : the instinct of self-preservation is lost, is swallowed 
up in the final instinct of destruction. The wise of old 
have written: "It is dangerous to trifle with the avenging 
fates." 

Now there is here a body of toilers, men and women, 
numbered by millions, to whom every outrage offered to 
the fellow is felt as a personal indignity, a dart that quivers 
and rankles in their own flesh. In this common multi- 
tude, made one by the sympathy and sensitiveness of the 
common outrage, this latent mania exists in full force, but 
is held hitherto in the consensus of repression. It struggles 
and is forced down : it heaves again and again, made by 
each new indignity less patient, more determined, more ter- 
rible ; loosening by little and little the accustomed restraints 
that held it in subjection. 

"Bread or blood!" — at any hour when the cry lifts wide 
and persistent the mania may emerge. There is not here 
to meet it, as in Europe, the obedient force of millions of 
soldiery. Our government does not rest on force : it is 
based on popular consent. These thousands of millions of 
dollars of the People's earned wealth, these hundreds of 
thousands of square miles of the People's heritage are ap- 
propriated by the capitalistic few, whose title holds only by 
pen and ink that has no binding force, excepting for so far 
and so long as the People is acquiescent. 

Let a whirl of mania forestall the final outlet of the whirl 
of evolution, and the insurrectionary explosion may flash 
across the continent, from sea-board to sea-board, between 
the rise and set of sun. Then the rule of the prudent wise 
of the multitude is lost in the reign of the Terror. Mania, 
the infernal goddess, whose hand brandishes the torch, 
may show by it the road to the guillotine. For the last 



TI-lE NEW REPUBLIC. 6i 

quarter of a century we have filled up the land with the dis- 
contented myriads of the old world : they came expecting 
freedom, hut have found new servitudes : they cameled on by 
hope : they sit down brooding and sullen with despair : the 
skies do not brighten to them, they darken and darken on. 

Social Nationalism and the kindred preparatory move- 
ments, by instilling hope and patience into the oppressed 
masses, hold in suppression the explosive forces : but these 
forces are approaching terribly near the surface : the limits 
of the safety-line are very nearly overpassed. 

Men have a curious habit of shutting the mental eyes to 
what they dislike or are afraid to see. Another habit, when 
successful, is that of thinking, in their phrase, that "old 
Mr. Luck will always be good to them." This habit holds 
possession of the average American mind. "No nation 
was ever so successful as ours ; therefore it must always be 
successful." They forget : this nation has been in rapid 
motion : a thousand years of result have been whirled in- 
to one century. Living so fast, it has lived almost to its end : 
its to-morrow is with Death. It may rise again, a New and 
Glorious Republic, socialised humanely to the resurrection 
of the just ; but, as to its present form, movement, custom 
and environment, it must first die. 



It was the saying of Mencius, the ancient Chinese sage, 
that "the object of knowledge is the discovery of the lost 
mind." Now man has found his superficial mind, that of 
the ego, his private self; and in it has found sublime 
thoughts, vast germs of theogonies, philosophies, poesies, 
humanities, that lie heaped, stranded on its margin like 
treasures from some rich-freighted foreign Argosy that has 
foundered in the seas. 



62 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

The shores of man's vast naturality are heaped with the 
vestiges, and they constitute the wealth and worth of his 
intellectual possessions. But he uses or misuses them as 
might the barbarian :this drifted statue serves for a god in 
the shrine of his fetishistic worship ; those relics of supreme 
culture for the adornments of his tinsel literature. 

"Whence came all these ? They have washed up from the 
Lost Mind, from the buried social reason, the suppressed, 
submerged intelligence of the social passion. All religions 
of amenity, all charms and graces and virtues in society, 
all that is truly sweet and dignified in human relations, 
all that is logical and immortal in the human hope were 
born in the social passion of the common breast ; flung 
forth to revelation through quickening faculties of the so- 
cial mind, and led to stature and persistence through the 
toiling, battling energy of the incipient social purpose. 

Now man, born into naturehood, is not as to his realness 
of natural origin. The acorn does not need that it should 
be planted in a grove of oaks to put forth the oak's quality 
and reveal' its peculiarity. The wolf cub or the ape babe 
does not need that he should be nursed and bonded in the 
wolfery or apery to evolve the instinct and cunning and 
fashion of his wolfishness or apishness : these are forms of 
nature, egoistic fantasies and formulas that are capable of 
evolution to full structure of their own species in their soli- 
tary individualism. Contrariwise the human babe, for 
the evolution of its humane quality, is dependent on its 
social environment. The proof of this is found in the fact 
that if the bo} T infant is stolen by wolves and introduced 
into the cave where the dam suckles her cubs, he will feed 
at her teats ; he will grow up with the young wolves as 
brothers and sisters ; he will travel on all-fours ; his lan- 
guage will be mere whine, bark and growl ; he will dive 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 63 

for the fish like an otter and eat them raw ; he will pursue 
the round of ferocious animal pleasures, ignorant entirely 
that he is not wolf, but man. 

Man, born with the germ of humanhood folded in and 
throughout the structure of his naturehood, can only com- 
mence to evolve and display the human quality as the so- 
cial touch of the human species makes a connection, by 
means of which that which is inmost and truly real within 
him may commence to elaborate and grow forth to surfaces. 
Humanly he is a germ that cannot grow excepting as it 
finds a substance and form of humanhood that shall serve 
as environment. By whatever there is of humanhood in 
the family, the babe is taught to walk rationally upright. 
But the humanhood in the family is still a struggling, not 
a triumphant force ; the really human family has yet to come ; 
its naturehood transubstantiated to the flesh and blood of 
the humane divinity. 

The child grown to youth, if of such human potence 
that he can hold the upright attitude, is famished for social 
food. According to his genius he searches for that food 
through religion, books, arts, the drama, poesies, heroisms, 
philosophies, sciences. In these he shapes environment ; 
in these he creates for himself the vaster family. 

He earns his bread by sweat of brow ; toils perchance 
all the daylight under the wage-master. — Night comes and 
his poor room opens : he is companioned there by each 
illustrious character whose fires have touched to him by 
the hand of art, or by the magic of the written page. He 
becomes, as they say, "a self-made man." — Not self-made! 
The form in which that virginal intelligence uplifts to en- 
rich mankind by new discovery, is the form that the envi- 
ronment of the saints and sages and artist-heroes, his 
familiars, fashioned and ingenerated in his flesh. Grows 



b4 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

he at length to be, in the old phrase, "inspired of God?" 
Yea, truly. The Supreme Power in evolution instars a 
splendor upon his brow, by so much as he took in this vast 
environment and made it invironment ; wrought of its woven 
folds, as we may say, a second nature. So drew in the bosom 
to grasp the rhythms of the nobler inspirations ; so trans- 
posed the action of the brain that he might think and 
reason from cause to effect, and thus from infinite to finite. 
For evolution, that it may evolve to round upon the globe, 
to fashion and transform its institutes, is dependent upon 
the environment in which its instruments are clad and 
armored for the fulfilments of its purpose. 

To call forth the lost mind is to find man again. What 
offense could be so unforgivable as the offense of instilling at 
one stroke into all the milk that mingles with the morning 
food of every child on the continent, a slow, rotting poison ; 
corrupting the growing, incipient humanhood in each, and 
devoloping the seeds of the instincts of animal ferocities. 

This is what our civilised individualism does : its envi- 
ronments-are so fashioned, so surcharged with the greeds 
and despotisms of all self-vice, that they flow as a constant 
element of seeming nutrition into the soft, hungry, recep- 
tive, indiscriminative sensitives of this vast childish body 
of incipient, dependent mankind. "Wait:" cry our amiable, 
intelligent conservatives; "when the race becomes angelic, 
they will accept the environments which you propose." 
Can they not see? The few heroic constitutions overcome 
in part the daily poisons on which conservatives insist that- 
all infants shall be fed: meanwhile the poisons make an 
ever-growing flood, bearing generation after generation 
down through defilements to the last corruption. 

If it be a sin which grows to infamy, that man persists in the 
degradation of his own human, how many million-fold a sin 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 65 

is it, that he should persist in strengthening, enlarging and 
making permanent the inhuman environments that by con- 
current action dehumanise, age by age, the masses of the 
peoples of the globe. Write this so deep, so high, so broad 
that, wherever man turneth,the fire of the letters shall burn 
in upon his brow; "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the least 
of these my little ones ye did it not unto Me." Accept this 
as the logic of the statement : they who persist for the dura- 
bility of environments that corrupt and ruin the human- 
boo 1 in man, are themselves guilty of his blood. "Am I 
my brother's keeper?" — Thou art ; and as thou keepest him 
so shall God keep thee. 



Yet here we are confronted with another class of facts, 
another series of laws ; the facts of the false heredity, the 
laws of the action of the unreason. The suppression of the 
ingermed racial consciousness, and the substitution there- 
for of a superficial egoistic consciousness, results in the en- 
thronement, as the temporary arbiter of destiny, of the 
fictitious human being ; the enormous, proud, cultured, non- 
social, anti-social and aggrandised ape. It is the ape, uni- 
versally simulative, deceptive, a diabolised product of 
naturehood, evolved through incipient manhood degraded 
into baseness, that Bismarckises, that Bonaparteises, that 
Gouldises, that McAllisterises, that Leopoldises ; — a fungus 
ape-growth in rotted manhood, which asserts the human 
in utter suppression of the humanly ; that clothes itself in 
all the stolen robes, woven in the looms of social reason by 
its social power, to flaunt its hideous deformity in the face 
of heaven ; its food our human flesh, its drink our human 
blood, its action our human waste and ruin. 

It is the scientific, governmental, diplomatic, financial, 



66 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

mechanical man-ape, that by an inverted collectivity of 
egoism is organised into the gigantic, opulent, overbearing- 
fraud, which holds this attitude, and is massed in this huge 
thing that fronts us in America by its aspect of Plutocracy. 
It is this that the Nation, in the intelligent lawfulness of its 
social manhood, must grasp by the throat and cast down 
and extirpate once for all. 

The Man-People is ridden tyrannically by the grinning, 
hairy Deformity, the old man of the mountain that crept 
on Sindbad in his sleep, and wound his hideous extremities 
around the neck and made his seat upon the shoulders of the 
wayfarer; whose limbs strangle, whose huge fist pounds upon 
the brain and bosom, who makes of the man his beast of 
burden and the wage-slave of his cupidities. This sums up 
the situation. "Let us have peace," said Ulysses Grant, 
after that last surrender at Appomatox. Let us have peace, 
as Sindbad found liberty. He only found it when the foe 
Avas extinguished beneath his feet.- 

VIII. 

Life is so bitter-sweet ; so chained in poverties, yet so filled 
and burdened by suppressed wealth of infinite riches! Life 
is so brief, by measure of the Hying years; so long when 
one weaves into it, by fire of passion, and fulness of cul- 
tures, and logic of right reason, and persistence of true en- 
deavor the spiral round of the eternities ! 

These gray hairs tell almost of the threescore years and 
ten, yet it seems as but yesterday that the child's lips kiss- 
ed to the mother's bosom. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, 
and to-morrow, and all the ways tread on to dusty death?" 
Nay, there is no death : our to-morrow is in God! 

Resuming, in this discourse, a Public Ministry that has 



THE X EW R.E PUBLIC. Qi 

been suspended for the last thirty years, words may be 
pardoned that should not otherwise be spoken; a reminis- 
cence be indulged in, that but for the end in view might 
savor of vain-glorying. Avoiding hitherto the personal, 
let me be forgiven if I employ it now. 

In 1848 I was minister of the Independent Christian 
Congregation in New York. There was a growing and 
alarming body of Juvenile Destitution and Crime in that 
city. During one pleasant summer week, for some un- 
known reason I was unable to think out my usual discourse. 
A strange brooding quietude and stillness possessed the 
mental faculties. Saturday evening came, leading with it 
a calm that became intense; that made in the senses a 
suppressed thrill. 

Retiring to the solitude of my study, it seemed that a 
voice, which was rather intelligence than voice, filled the 
air and played by a rhythm into the brain, generating 
words ; "We wish you to write for us to-night." The same 
voice, by an identical process seems with me now. 

1 sat down at my desk, and the words of the Christ came 
for a text ; "Suffer little children to come unto me and for- 
bid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God." From 
this I went on to write, as rapidly as words or symbols of 
words could be traced on the paper ; yet with most absolute 
self-possession, and concentration of mental passion. No 
pause, no intromission of a foreign thought till the whole 
was written : no cerebral excitement, but the continued 
breathing rhythm, diffused in solemn yet joyful calm. 

I read that discourse on Sunday morning to my great 
congregation : read it in that same mystery of vibrating 
intelligence, quivering with love, calm as the stillness of a 
perfect night in mid-summer ; while from eye to eye it 
seemed as if the hushed, melted audience diffused an atmos- 



BS THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

phere that held the dew of tears. 

As the people rose unwilling to depart, Mr. Horace Greeley^ 
one of the office-bearers of the Parish, stood up in his place 
and requested the congregation to remain. A public meet- 
ing was organised, and the "New York Juvenile Asylum" 
was born from the deliberations. A committee of the Parish 
was placed in charge of the initiatory work. 30,000 copies 
of the sermon were distributed in pamphlet form as rap- 
idly as possible. The discourse, in parts or in entirety, 
was copied in leading dailies. And, heretical as the author 
was considered, the sermon was preached verbatim on the 
following Sunday from leading orthodox pulpits ; good 
Dr. Muhlenburg, rector of the episcopal church of the Holy 
Communion, prefacing by saying that it was borne on his 
heart to address his people on the subject, but that this 
discourse said what he wanted to say in better words than 
any of his own. A charter was procured at the incoming 
session of the Legislature : the gifts of the citizens of New 
York were supplemented by a large public appropriation : 
lands wero purchased and an edifice at once commenced ; 
the good work so far accomplished. 

The course of public life led me away from New York at 
no distant period. The incident, was almost buried from 
memory till some years afterward, a solitary wayfarer, in 
the dusk twilight, weighted with huge griefs and burdens 
of the People's care, I passed a great edifice, enclosed in 
ample pleasure grounds, on an eminence in the suburbs of 
the city. I heard from it the chorus of many voices of 
children singing their evening hymn. I asked a passer by, 
"What building is that?" He answered, "the New York 
Juvenile Asylum." — Verily, "he that goeth forth and 
weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again 
with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 09 

Xow I have? referred to the incident, that the application 
may be to the present time. This great Columbia is an ampler 
New York. Every man in it, every woman in it, is by the in- 
most human a little child. Ah ! and how really destitute is 
this child, this child People, pining for that divine human- 
hood which can never be reached by any one, till it shall 
be realised in the common society and enri ■hinent of all. 

This Common Body of our Commonwealth is lacerated : 
it Weeds at every pore : this common breast is ripped open : 
these common senses and members are pollute 1, in the de- 
filement of the land's daughters, and in the debasement 
and profligacy of its sons. 

The Rich know — and I appeal to them — that, gaining 
wealth, they are still pauperised, defrauded from the vital 
satisfactions, in the absence of which gain is but waste and 
gold but misery. 

The Poor — to them I appeal — they know, for they see 
and feel, that mankind and womankind are rotting down 
around them ; that there are worse griefs than those that 
come from insecure employment and incomplete reward. 

Sec ! man and wife look on these prattlers about the table, ' 
these babies in the crib or on the breast. They dare not 
forecast : they shrink utterly appalled from the thought, — 
I cannot say it all: your sympathetic hearts will till the le- 
sion, — the thought of the ominous, broken-hearted future. 

Lo ! and this night — every night of the year — Hell 
opens, organised, exacting, palpable, with its bloody sweat 
dripping to the flagstones; and with its ribald blasphemy 
an offense to every passer by. Hell opens; never closes; 
the ever-growing and devouring, the ever-remorseless, the 
ever-insatiable. 

A gentleman whom I knew in New York said to me, in 
effect, " You may think that these loot girls come mainly 



70 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

from the toiling classes. In the parlor of Madame I 

made the acquaintance of so and so; a graduate of Vassar 
College. On thus greeting her, she filled my astonishment 
by telling me of seventeen girls from Vassar whom she 
knew, who were in the city, and receiving gentlemen as she 
was doing." 

One such as these, yet unstained, is worth more in Hea- 
ven's eyes and to God's heart than all this wealth of Stan- 
ford. One such, in the utter loss, is more loss, on the scale 
of human magnitudes and values, than if California with 
all her riches went down to be buried in the sea. 

Now I plead, I plead for the soul-flesh and body-flesh, the 
soul-blood and body-blood of Living Columbia. I gather 
up all this wealth of sonship that is blasting ; all this riches 
of daughterhood that is withering, and show them to you. 
I gather up all this mass of sordid, defiled, corrupted, ruined 
manhood and womanhood, that around our feet becomes 
wormy and serpentine; that soaks the air with vice, and 
loads it with corruption. 

I gather up in one, this great, glorious husbandhood and 
fatherhood, this sacred wifehood and motherhood of America; 
benignant, mighty, awful in force of character, beautiful 
in fore-gleam of the immortalities. Then I say, Let us have 
mercy on our own most vital qualities ; our own most as- 
sertive virtues. Let us have respect to the fountains of our 
enjoyments and the high sources of their beatitudes. Let 
us find anew the springs of our origin and enter by full 
movement into the flowings of our destiny. Let us cast 
out from our temple the "money changers and those who 
sell doves." Let us dare to penetrate to the vital fact of 
Life, that is buried within this surface show of custom, ha- 
bit, partisanship and rivalry. Let us once for all take in 
this truth of truths, that for every sister that is ruined a 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 71 

vital part of us is rotted ; that for ever}* man who goes to 
wreck a vital part of us is deranged and withered. 

Again I say, "Little children !" — Now then let the Father 
speak in Christ, from the old gracious words, "Suffer little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them not ; for of 
such is the kingdom of God." 

If Columbia can but open heart, mind and purpose to this 
Brother Christ, this divine incarnation of fraternity in the 
heart and flesh of man; — if she can bat compass the prin- 
ciple that works to the social righteousness by the instant 
and immanent laws of our common human evolution, the 
miseries of the People shall roll from them as the stone 
from the sepulcher, and their manhood and womanhood 
shall rise, rilled with God, as if in all such goodly vastness 
this Christ were risen. 



Finally, if this speech is with an assurance of certainty, 
it is not as from the religious or social enthusiast: these 
are the matured convictions of the long-trained specialist 
in public affairs. It is not the one side of Truth that helps, 
especially in crisis and emergency : it is Truth in full circle, 
rounded to the touch of every salient point and pressure of 
the occasion. The study of this one life has been to be- 
come a fall-centered, all-round man. 

Each vital problem of man has its outer form and envi- 
ronment of social-industrial bone, flesh, nerve and skin : 
each political, industrial, social problem has its vital con- 
tent and invironment of human thought, passion and pas- 
sionate force. Each class, each specialty of human character 
and condition, is played through by the vital currents that 
make for the higher, the humanising and final evolution. 
It is by the concurrence of all these vital currents, rising 



72 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 

by the rhythms of their sympathies through the luminous 
and socialised man, that evolution pushes on to avouch and 
demonstrate for the last conclusions. 

Whoever would know mankind thoroughly, as he now is 
and is environed, must mentally, feelingly and practically 
enter into and abide in the fellowship of his universal ser- 
vice. This, by the continuous duties of a half-century of 
humane toil, I have sought to do ; till, standing in the door- 
way that opens from the co npletel round, I find and meet 
mankind, full breast. And man is still precious; more 
precious, in that I have found the touch of the divinity 
that survives within him, in spite of all the chronic malady 
and defilement. 

From this acme of result one thing at least is logically 
evident: it is this, that given the men, evolutionised into 
the spirit and passion of the service ; given a quickening 
of the masses; given the ho/ir of the opportune, it is no 
more a matter of difficulty to organise the New Republic, 
throned iivthe structures of fitting environment, crowned 
with the splendid lights of a supreme human intelligence, 
than it was for the Argonauts of '48 to open the treasures 
of the placars, and fur their successors to establish this pre- 
sent Statehood. 

But evolution now is reaching to the result for which all 
the advance of former struggle was but preparative. The 
complex structure that we know as Civilisation has reach- 
ed the utmost verge to which it can travel on the lines and 
levjh, anl by means of tin activities of the private self, 
and its mutually repe lant and adverse individualisms. 
The People touches to the last stone of the road, whence 
there is no further path of advance on the present lines of 
human travel. Beyond this is but ascent, or downfall into 
ruin. The Hour is pregnant: the evolutionary forces are 



THE NEW REPUBLIC. 



involving stores of energies; making of the deeper, the 
more interior vessels of the human system treasuries, mag- 
azines, laboratories for the fiery and fluid powers. 



Surely there is a way, could it be found, by which these 
laws and forms of humane social relations might be so pre- 
sented, that this whole body of the common vital People 
might hear them gladly and accept them cordially, as was 
once of old : then might it be said, "the fields are white al- 
ready for the harvest ;" then might be fulfilled that ancient 
social prophecy of "a nation born in a day." 

The People's breast is pregnant with all manner of good 
and fruitful seeds. These obsolete customs, jealousies, dis- 
sentions, superstitions ; these swinish and wolfish environ- 
ments bite and freeze upon that vast bosom. All are afraid 
to suffer the social worths that are in them to cleave the 
bulb, and put forth the tender springing leaf. 

Servitors are called for by the Hour, so inspired and re- 
dolent of this human heat and radiancy that, entering among 
the People, they shall meet and overcome these bitter 
storms and colds of winter wherein the better life is buried 
and the days are slain. 

A multitude of clear thinkers, who are yet cold thinkers, 
are ready to admit and to hope for the grand national-in- 
dustrial result, but this only as a consequence of very slow 
and partial change. They see the New Boston of "Look- 
ing Backward" lifting possibly by the close of another thou- 
sand years. 

The Nation is socially barbaric : be this granted. Bur- 
ied in naturality ; unable to conceive of its own latent hu- 
manhood : be this also granted. Yet was not Ireland a con- 
geries of raging savage hordes ? Then did not the youth 
10 



74 THE NEW EEPUBLIC. 

Patrick, solitary, unfriended, unarmed, venture into the very 
heart of it ? Did not an humane civilisation quicken by 
his touch ? Did not that rugged mass of harsh and cruel 
barbarism melt from granite to warm soil, open for sowings 
of the generous and kindly harvest? Did not Augustine 
penetrate the gloomy recesses of Albion and, as by the wav- 
ing of extended arms, cleave and clear the wilderness for 
the rising cultures of a quickening mankind? 

Has the race so hardened and chilled since then that 
Histoiy cannot repeat itself to that higher result of evolu- 
tion which these old transformations shaped for and pre- 
figured ? It is always safe to trust the latencies of evolution, 
when their ascending pressures are felt moving through 
the great Common Heart. It is always safe to make the 
final and supreme appeal, not to the instincts of the feed- 
ing animal, but to the reasoning enthusiasm of the yearn- 
ing man, in whom the Power dwells that would lift him up 
to stand, according to the potence and promise of his origin, 
revealing the insociate likeness of Almighty God. — " Accord- 
ing to thy faith so shall it be to thee." 

Let Boston but find her Patrick, her Augustine, and a 
sublimer vision than that of Bellamy will greet her ; even 
as if the hanging curtains of the mirage vanished, to reveal 
on solid soil the paradisal familisteries and temples of an 
actualised Apocalypse. The environment follows the man. 
The energy of transforming Character moves on, in the logic 
of the event, to shape its out-birth in transformed environ- 
ments of institutions. 

For this waits New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San 
Francisco, — each great mart and center of thought and toil. 
By this the shadowed Ethiopa of our dark belt shall " stretch 
forth her hands to God," and so embrace the Social Deity. 
Prophesy to these dry bones of Nationality ; and the dry 



T HE X K W E E P U B L 1 C . , ; » 

bones shall live, and stand up as in EzekieFs vision ; an ex- 
ceeding great and mighty host. It is not now "educate" alone: 
it is inspire and educate: bear the uplift on through the 
propaganda of social education. Repeat in social worth of 
work the miracle of Wesley's impoverished but irresistible 
itinerancy. Hearts must be converted and opened to the 
social passion, as once they were initiated to the individual 
promise of the life eternal. 

No more needs here be said. "They who are wise" in 
this emergency "shall shine as the sun," and they who 
lead this bewildered, constrained and perishing many into 
the enduring organic form of the People's social righteous- 
ness "as the stars forever and ever." The evidence and 
fulfilment of the promise is open to every one who rises to 
welcome, and persists to entertain and serve the Genius of 
the Hour. 

Open thy vast womaned heart, thou Mother Columbia! 
Reach forth immaculate arms, wide to the farthest, and 
low to the poorest of thy babes. Speak thou, in tones as 
when the Master spake, and the grave opened, and the 
dead heard and arose and lived again. Call thou, that thine 
own who love thee may inspire life, purpose and courage 
by the spirit of the message : " Suffer little children to come 
unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom 
of God." 



J 



Appended Note. 



There are, as I think, two strong tendencies, each seeking for expres- 
sion through the industrial agitation of our time. There is first, on the 
outside, a tendency to the formation of a system of action in lines of 
material advance, pure and simple. Unless I am mistaken — which I 
truly hope that I may be — there seems to be an impulse in certain 
quarters to push the movement upon the lines of the economic ; to 
bring about legislation that proffers a sure and abundant recompense 
for material labors, by means of the appeal to educated and enlight- 
ened selfishness. We in America have been so inbred to the commer- 
cial spirit, so accustomed to make of each humane service a matter of 
mere dicker, to rely upon considerations addressed to the interests of 
the private self as weapons for the advance of change and the ameliora- 
tion of institutions, that there is a persistent reluctance to the com- 
plication of affairs by any introduction of the pure ethic. 

There are inevitably, as Mr. Gronlund puts it, " two temperaments 
among us, those of an individualistic and those of a socialistic temper- 
ament," In other words, there are men, and able men, who endeavor 
to think out the problem, and enforce the methods of the occasion from 
the ground of the finite, private ego. Now, the educated private ego 
sees full well the material side of all this splendid opportune : to its 
vision all the kingdoms of this world and all the powers of them, the 
wealth, the art, the pleasure are easily within the grasp of the huge, 
organised multitude, which by the conflux of ego to ego shall be able 
to uplift and throne that common private self in its resplendent but 
superficial paradise. 

The present capitalistic system is bleeding to death ; it is committing 
suicide. There is but one remaining alternative at the service of the 
concentrated Plutocracy : that is, boldly and decisively, to adopt the 
form of National Collectivism as the clothing for its own spirit, The 
associated interests that command Congress, legislatures, courts, parties ; 
the nation's wealth, implements and soil; its army, navy and police; if 



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they but in this emergency are wise to the full wisdom of their selfishness, 
have it possibly in their power to suppress the humanly in man, by the 
shaping of compromised adjustments that shall satisfy the measure of 
his civilized animality. The Gold Colossus, master-piece upon the board 
of Evil Destiny, may be able yet so to array bishops and castles and 
knights and pawns, as to combine in its allegiance the present opposing 
forces ; unless perchance the Power behind evolution wills that it shall 
be otherwise. 

Some are already saying, " narrow the question down to the mate- 
rial." The issue that awaits, is between these two policies, the ethical 
and the material. Mr. Gronlund says again, " I am more and more 
convinced that Karl Marx's doctrine, that the bread and butter question 
is the motive force of progress, is not tenable ; but that we must grasp 
the very highest moral and religious truths." Is there or is there not an 
infinite human truth, which is to the vast public movement of the time, 
as the soul of the man is to the body of the man? If so, are we to ignore 
that infinite human truth? The Master of Nazareth, were he here now, 
would hardly be able to find a place, certainly not a full expression of 
his thought, in any periodical which would object to the consideration 
of the problem of the humanly, in its devotion to the economic. 

I have sought in these pages, in some tentative and I fear very imper- 
fect way, to set forth this fact of the humanly: to show that this vast 
social movement that seeks to become organic environment should nu- 
cleate, not around a common greed, but around a common God. I speak 
but as a pupil and under great embarrassments ; yet I speak because the 
burden is upon me. 



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